became a soldier in the Confederate Army, and was made medical director of the department of the West, by Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, and was in the battles of Shiloh, Murfreesboro, and Chickamauga. In 1867 he was elected to the chair of the science and practice of medicine in the University of Louisville, and in 1869 took there the chair of clinical surgery. As a teacher of clinical surgery he had few rivals.
In operating he cut to the line and to the required depth with geometrical precision. His dissections were artistic, and he found his way through the labyrinthine surgical spaces with certainty and safety. His dressings were beautiful, while his treatment of wounds, surgical and accidental, was characterized by a scrupulous cleanliness, which in post bellum days was prophetic of aseptic surgery. In 1870, in conjunction with Theophilus Parvin (q.v.), he established The American Practitioner, which held high place in medical literature for sixteen years (1886), when it was combined with the Medical News, under the name American Practitioner and News. He was editor-in-chief of this journal till the year of his death. All his writings were forceful, terse, and condensed. One of his own papers, published in the second volume of the Practitioner, is a classic. This is an analysis of 415 cases of tetanus.
His nature was gentle and affectionate; his liberality and benevolence conspicuous. He married Francis Jane Crutcher, of Nashville, Tennessee, in 1851, and had four children, a son and three daughters. He died in Louisville, Monday, the second of May, 1898, of arterio-sclerosis, his last illness stretching over a period of five years. During the last two years his mind was a blank.
His contributions to literature include:
"Notes on Medical Matters and Medical Men in London and Paris," Louisville, 1848; "Reply to the Attack of Dr. E. S. Gaillard" (American Practitioner, Louisville, 1871); "A Clinical Lecture on the Use of Plastic Dressing in Fractures of Lower Extremity," 1876; "Pioneer Surgery in Kentucky;" a sketch, 1890; "Temperament," an address, 1892; "Battey's Operation," 1875.
Yandell, Lunsford Pitts (1805–1878)
Briefly summed up, the professional life of Lunsford P. Yandell is that he graduated M. D. from the University of Maryland, 1825, and was professor of chemistry, Transylvania University, 1831–1837; founder of Louisville Medical Institute, 1837, which became University of Louisville, 1846; professor of chemistry, materia medica, and physiology, in the University of Louisville 1837–1858; geologist; minister of the gospel (Presbyterian), 1862; editor Transylvania Medical Journal, Lexington; editor Western Medical Journal, Louisville; president Kentucky State Medical Society, 1878.
He was born July 4, 1805, on his father's farm near Hartsville, Sumner County, Tennessee; his father, Dr. Wilson Yandell, being a native of North Carolina. Of Lunsford's childhood and early school days nothing is known. He began to study medicine under his father, attended one course of lectures at the Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky, and another at the University of Maryland. After six years' practice in Tennessee, he was called to the chair of chemistry in the Transylvania University. This chair he held until 1837, when he came to Louisville, where he was a founder of the Medical Institute which in 1846 became the University of Louisville. During the war he was for a time in the hospital service of the Confederacy. In 1862 he was licensed to preach by the Memphis Presbytery, and served as pastor of a church in Dancyville, Tennessee, but in 1867 he returned to Louisville and resumed practice, though preaching frequently, as occasion offered. He devoted much time to literary work and geological research, in these departments being a pioneer in the West. He made many valuable contributions to paleontology, preparing numerous papers and enriching the science through discoveries in fossils. As early as 1847 he published, with Dr. B. F. Shumard, "Contributions to the Geology of Kentucky." In 1848 a note by Prof. Yandell concerning the discovery of calcareous arms in Pentremites Florealis was pubilshed in the Bulletin of the Geological Society of France. In 1855 he discovered a new genus of Crinoidea, which he named Acrocrinus Shumardi.
Sir Charles Lyell, Prof. Owen, and other masters in paleontology recognized the value of his work, and his name stands memorialized and immortalized in fossils as follows: Platycrinus Yandelli (Owen and Shumard); Actinocrinus Yandelli (Shumard); Chonetes Yandellana (Prof. James Hall); Amplexus, Yandelli (Edwards and Haime); Trachonema
