The Midwest pioneer, his ills, cures, & doctors - University Library ...

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more stable existence and continued to 1886, when it became
nominally the Medical Department of the University
of Cincinnati. This arrangement in reality meant nothing,
and not until ten years later was a definite relationship
effected.
Simultaneously various minor medical schools were developing
in Ohio. Willoughby in 1834 established a university
which organized a medical department in the next
year. In 1847 this medical department was transferred to
Columbus and reorganized as the Starling Medical College.
The Cleveland Medical College (Western Reserve) , founded
in 1843, was flourishing under the capable leadership of Dr.
Jared Potter Kirtland. Dr. Alvah H. Baker's institution
operated after 1851 as the Cincinnati College of Medicine
and Surgery. Its first decade was an interrupted chain of
internal and external troubles, largely attributable to the
selfish and domineering manner of the founder. In 1854
it was the scene of "one of the most fiendish crimes in the
history of the West," when one Arrison settled a personal
quarrel by the delivery of an infernal machine to a medical
student, Isaac H. Allison, which killed him and his wife
and nearly wrecked the building.
The warfare among these schools, when added to the
strife occasioned by the introduction of the many irregular
factions and quack representatives, made Ohio, and particularly
Cincinnati, the medical No-Man's Land of the
period.
St. Louis, though older than either Cincinnati or Louisville,
lagged almost a generation behind in the development
of western medical education. In 1840 Dr. Joseph Nash
McDowell, brilliant but eccentric nephew of Dr. Ephraim
McDowell, with a group of St. Louis physicians organized
a medical school under the charter of Kemper College, an
institution maintained by the Protestant Episcopal Church.
McDowell was born at Lexington, Kentucky, in 1803 and
received his medical degree from Transylvania in 1825.
After teaching anatomy for a year at Transylvania, he went
to Philadelphia, where for one year he taught anatomy at