Daniel Drake (1785–1852)

In December of 1845 Daniel Drake, a well known physician and educator in America’s west during the first half of the 19th century, widowed years before he found himself alone in Louisville teaching at the Louisville Medical Institute. His family was miles up river in Cincinnati and the river was flooding, interrupting river travel, his line of communication with his family. Perhaps feeling isolated he began to write what would become a series of letters to his children that would detail his early life. In 1788 his parents brought him, at the age of three, from their home in New Jersey to make a new home in the Virginia wilderness. They were among the earliest families to immigrate into the region that would become Kentucky. Drakes son, Missouri Senator and chief justice of the United States Court of Claims collected and edited those letters into this book, “Pioneer Life in Kentucky 1785-1800” and had it published 1870, 18 years after his father’s death. Daniel Drake was a fine writer, he lived in interesting times, and his book holds up very well 150 years after he wrote the words.

The popular book was reissued in 1907 and again in 1948. This is the 1948 edition which was edited by Dr. Emmet Horne M.D. Horne, a dedicated fan of Drake, found that the original letters had been edited by Charles Drake before publication and decided to restore them to their original form. I am not a fan of Horne, his 1963 biography of Drake seemed to be an argument for sainthood rather than an honest biography of a complicated, real, human being. Here however I think Horne has done us a service. In addition to restoring short sections of text he added biographical sketches to explain who the letters were to and who the people that Drake mentioned were. Personally I was very please to see that Horne had even restored Drake’s original misspellings. In Drake’s time spelling was not as standardized as it is today but it filled me with joy to see someone as successful as Dr. Drake could also be so creative in his spelling.

Horne also points out how important this account was, how often it was cited and quoted, by other historians and biographers. Today it seems to have faded in importance, we have a much longer history to look at and we understand that a memoir written a half century after the fact is unreliable at best. The book is still worth reading. Although I don’t trust that the name of the man Drakes father worked with as a teamster, one time, when Drake was three years old is recorded accurately I do feel that he got the feeling of the era right. The mundane details that I found so interesting were simple facts Drake grew up with. I am as confident that Drake’s memory of his family's second cabin being built on a hill with a space underneath to safely lock livestock in night is as accurate as my memory that my families second home boarded a golf course.

In addition to giving us a look at pioneer life in pre-Kentucky Virginia, Drake’s letters give us a look at Drake’s family and professional life as a professor of medicine on the Ohio River at the middle of the 19th century. As Horne pointed out, this was a very popular book, a few pages into it I started to suspect that I had read it many years ago in school. If the feeling is correct I laid it down after getting through the part about Indians and the wilderness because the feeling faded after the first fifty or so pages. If you are interested in the history of the early United States you might want to take a look at this book. Even if you think you may have read it years ago there is much more here than Indian stories.… (more)

In 1815 thirty year old physician Daniel Drake wrote and published a volume intended to attract settlers to his adopted home of Cincinnati. His Natural and statistical view; or picture of Cincinnati and the Miami country, illustrated by maps. With an appendix, containing observations on the late earthquakes, the aurora borealis, and the south-west wind, is an interesting, sometimes fun, look back at what south western Ohio, its towns and its people were like two hundred years ago.
Unlike most classically trained physicians of the era, Drake had the curiosity of a scientist, a word that may not have been in use at the time. In two appendices to the regular text Drake writes details of the effects felt in Cincinnati from the 1811 New Madrid earthquakes. One web page on from the United States Geological Survey sites his book as “possibly the earliest account that not only describes amplification within sedimentary valleys but also provides a qualitatively correct explanation for the effect ("The strata in both vallies are loose.")” In the second he records and discusses the meteorological conditions during an appearance of the aurora borealis. Here, and when he is discussing the “elephant and rhinoceros” bones found south of Cincinnati at Big Bone Lick it becomes obvious to us in the twenty first century that this is a very intelligent man grasping to understand things that, at that time, with their knowledge of the physical world, are beyond comprehension.
The spelling is not standardized, which for me is no problem, and there are many archaic words but I found the book a joy to read. It is the next best thing to a time machine. You can find the book in the Hathi Trust Digital Library at http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433081827002… (more)

In 1832-33 an epidemic the deadly disease Cholera swept across North America. Cincinnati’s oldest and most widely written physician, Dr. Daniel Drake, who the Daniel Drake Memorial Hospital, now Drake Center, was named for, published this short (49 page) history in December of 1832, just three months after the city’s first case. A reader would need some background in medical history to understand the education Drake had and some knowledge of Cholera in order to appreciate the book. However, it is difficult to have less of either than I do and I truly appreciated the insight into the dawn of the era of medical science and, to be honest, insight on Dr. Drake’s ego.

Drake’s writing is still very readable, there are a few Latin phrases I had to google, not all medical terms, but overall the language very familiar. The book is available online at the National Institute of Health’s National Library of Medicine. Drake’s discussion of the Cholera treatments other physicians have written about demonstrates that he was very well read on the subject. The book is a good resource for people researching Cincinnati and medical history and it also may have utility for someone looking into trade patterns, race relations on the Borderlands, and government involvement in health care.… (more)