Reprint from the American Practitioner, February, 1884. 
SUPPLEMENT 
A REPLY. 
“ I shall, no doubt, be criticised by many for dwelling so long on a subject which to them 
will appear low, vulgar, and trifling. . . . Were I to treat my subject superficially, my writing 
would be of no use to any body, and my labor would be lost; but by investigating it thor- 
oughly I may, perhaps, engage others to pay that attention to it which, from its importance, it 
deserves.”—Count Rumford. 
I find myself the subject of an offensive paragraph in a 
printed circular which, though without signature, was issued 
by the Louisville Medical this ci^7j|This circular 
liasbeen distributed among the students now in attendance on 
my lectures at the University of Louisville, and scattered broad- 
cast over the country. 
I have also been assailed by the same source, over its faculty 
name, in the Courier-Journal newspaper. 
Attacks of such character on my own name I can well afford 
to leave unanswered. But in both the articles alluded to, and 
in yet another which I shall recur to presently, the University 
of Louisville, in whose service my revered father spent all his 
best days and in which for more than thirty years I have been 
a teacher, has been assailed in such terms as to make some 
reply expedient if not necessary. 
The other article to which I just referred appeared as an edi- 
torial in the January number of the Medical Herald, a journal 
published in this city and owned by two of the teachers in the 
Louisville Medical College. It reads as follows: “The Louis- 
ville Medical College has been assailed both in the present and in 2 
Supplement. 
the past by as able a body of petjurers, mendacious scribblers, and 
unscrupulous slanderers as exist in the land /” 
As the University of Louisville was the chief instrument, 
some years back, in directing public attention to the irregular 
practices of the Louisville Medical College, and equally the 
chief agent in compelling that institution to abandon them, the 
editorial quoted is unmistakably aimed at the University. And 
the Herald being the organ of the Louisville Medical College, 
this assault on the University, no less than that contained in the 
printed circular, and that published in the Courier-Journal, was 
made by the Louisville Medical College. The three articles are 
so many attacks upon the University—nothing more, nothing 
less. The organ of the Louisville Medical College means by 
the word “present” in its editorial also to designate the Univer- 
sity. For when it became apparent early last autumn that the 
Louisville Medical College, after five years of reasonably good 
behavior, had begun to return to its old sins, the Louisville Med- 
ical News journal, edited by two members of the University fac- 
ulty, asked the school to give over its palpable misconduct. 
The answer to this request is contained in the several assaults I 
have indicated. 
A sense of duty to the profession at large, to medical teach- 
ing, and the University of Louisville in particular, and to myself 
individually, leads me to undertake a task which, though exces- 
sively unpleasant, I shall not find very difficult. It is unpleasant 
because it involves the exposure of several persons whom I like. 
It is easy, because I shall rest my case on the written statements 
of the persons whom I accuse. I shall use plain words because I 
realize the importance of the subject. I shall use courteous 
words because I realize my own position. Not many of them will 
be my words, because better are at hand, furnished by the prac- 
tices and persons I am going to portray. I shall make no state- 
ment which can not be substantiated by documentary evidence. 
I am going to make no defense of the University of Louisville. 
That institution is not on trial. But in the interests of legiti- 
mate teaching, and of the dignity and honor of medicine, I am Supplement. 
3 
going to show the antecedents, the character, and the practices 
of its assailant. In order to do this in the most effective way I 
am going to arraign the Louisville Medical College before the 
bar of professional opinion — the highest tribunal known to 
physicians—on the general charge of practices which are dis- 
reputable in themselves and subversive of many of the best 
interests of the profession. 
I shall prove that it has broken faith with other medical 
schools in this city and elsewhere, in that in its printed ad- 
vertisements its fees are put at eighty dollars, and in the face of 
these published terms it has flooded the country with so-called 
beneficiary scholarships, wherein it volunteers to accept fifty, 
nay even forty dollars for tuition instead of eighty dollars as 
advertised. 
I shall also prove that through its officers and attaches it 
has solicited in almost every part of America students by letter 
to accept these scholarships. 
I shall establish that in addition to such solicitations being 
themselves repugnant to all right feeling men, they are in direct 
violation of articles of public agreement among a large number 
of the best medical schools of the United States, and contrary 
to the sentiment of all respectable teaching bodies every where, 
and that the Louisville Medical College signed the agreement 
referred to. 
I shall further show that these letters of solicitation contain 
statements which are the very opposite of the truth, and promises 
which in the nature of things could never be fulfilled. 
I shall prove that the present is not the first time the Louis- 
ville Medical College has sinned in the ways named, but that it 
is an old offender, one who has been tried and convicted before 
the same bar in whose presence it now stands of the same 
high crimes and misdemeanors with which it is now charged. 
Finally, I shall prove that the practices which I have named 
not only bring the profession into disrepute, “but do great mis- 
chief to many young men who have been deluded into the snares 
of the institution.” 4 
Supplement. 
Before proceeding to substantiate the foregoing statements 
by the testimony of witnesses, I shall save time by giving a 
short sketch of the accused. 
The birth of the Louisville Medical College, which occurred 
in 1869, was regarded wherever known with suspicion. Its very 
name was believed by the public to have been chosen by its 
founders in the expectation that it would deceive the unwary, 
and thus add to the size of its classes. In other terms, it began 
life as a pirate, in that it imitated a trade-name under which a 
rival college had during a long and honorable career won de- 
served distinction. 
With its first public announcement the Louisville Medical 
College entered upon a career of unexampled wrong and pur- 
sued it during a period of eight years—from 1869 to 1877— 
pursued it, indeed, until it was arrested by the Louisville Med- 
ical News journal, which prosecuted it with a vigor that se- 
cured its early conviction and won a verdict which was received 
with approval by the profession every where. The institution 
now publicly confessed its sins and promised to abandon them. 
It signed written agreements with large numbers of respect- 
able colleges in different parts of the country to charge a 
uniform rate for tuition, to receive but five per cent of benefi- 
ciaries—the basis of calculation being the class of the preceding 
year—to be careful in the selection of them even—to solicit no 
one and to underbid other institutions in no way whatever. This 
was in the summer of 1877. For five years the reform of the 
Louisville Medical College seemed to be genuine. Occasionally 
reports would come of a tendency to backslide, but no public 
charges were laid at its door. 
It pursued its way unmolested, but its classes fell off. It 
made many and radical changes in its faculty, but the falling off 
in its classes continued. Something had to be done. It aban- 
doned its old quarters, leased a dwelling-house and changed it to 
a lecture-house. But an open field and honest practices had not 
proved wholesome to the Louisville Medical College, and real- 
izing that the shrinkage in its classes could be stayed by no Supplement. 
5 
other means it plunged without one moment’s warning back into 
the very nastiness out of which the University had lifted it a few 
years ago. For a second time it resorted to the same discredit- 
able means which in days gone by had filled its benches. 
This was last summer—the summer of 1883. 
As a result of these recent misdeeds the institution is now 
again presented as a public enemy—as the enemy of upright- 
ness and fair dealing in the profession of which it claims to be 
an instructor. 
In this connection I will add that the present Professors of 
Anatomy and of Obstetrics in the Louisville Medical College 
held similar positions in that institution during the period 
alluded to and that the present Professor of Clinical and Opera- 
tive Surgery was also identified with the institution at an 
earlier date. Neither of these, therefore, can be allowed to 
plead in extenuation of this, their second offense, that they 
were ignorant of the law or the penalty for its infraction. The 
two first named teachers paid very dearly for a lesson which 
they seem to have soon forgot. 
The present Professor of the Principles and Practice of Medi- 
cine in the Louisville Medical College was, with the late R. O. 
Cowling, Professor of Surgery in the University of Louisville, 
co-editor of the Louisville Medical News journal, during the 
first two years of its existence, the eventful period when that 
trenchant sheet consecrated its fine powers to exposing the 
wrongs, uncovering the irregularities, and shattering the shams 
then practised by the institution in which he now holds a place. 
He unquestionably contributed his part to holding the Louis- 
ville Medical College up to the gaze of men ; he assisted in 
hammering it into a public confession of its sins and extorting 
from it promises to lead in future a more honorable and cleanly 
life. I shall not attempt to show that the present Professor of 
Principles and Practice of Medicine in the Louisville Medical 
College wrote all the articles contained in that journal assailing 
the practices of the Louisville Medical College, for he did not. 
But he certainly wrote some of them, and just as certainly sug- 6 
Supplement. 
gested others. And those who knew him at that time—who 
knew him before he linked his fortunes with the Louisville 
Medical College, could not be made to believe that he did not 
sanction and approve the course of that journal when its every 
issue was an assault upon the evils for which he must now 
be held in part responsible. But whether he actually penned 
many or none of the editorials referred to—numbers of which I 
shall have occasion to introduce in evidence—he was responsible 
for ALL throughout the entire time that he was connected with the 
News. I do not believe he himself will deny this responsibility. 
For up to the day that he cast his lot with the Louisville Medi- 
cal College, no one was more ready than he to condemn, to de- 
nounce, to spit upon whatever was unprofessional or savored of 
bad faith. None knew better than he did then—none knows 
better than he does at this moment that the practice of flood- 
ing the country with beneficiary scholarships, of urging medical 
students to accept a medical education as a gratuity, “tends,” as 
he expressed it in the News, “to destroy the independence of 
character of the future medical men of the country, to invite 
into the profession men who have no particular taste for it, but 
who are tempted by the privilege accorded to them of a cheap 
medical education.” None realized more fully than he the truth 
of the following, which appeared in his journal, written perhaps 
by himself, of the very school in which he is now a teacher, and 
when its “ miserable beneficiary sham,” as he called it, was no 
more offensive to decent men than at present: 
“This is a magnificent sham you are invited to assist; a 
solemn humbug ; a fearful sell.” 
“We greatly doubt if there is any thing in the civilized world 
like the beneficiary system of the Louisville school. The bene- 
ficiary system of the school is indefensible even were it built 
upon a fee ten times as large.” 
But to the proof. 
The witnesses I shall introduce are drawn exclusively from 
the institution at the bar. They compose its faculty, and their 
names and positions are as follows: 
C. W. Kelly, M. D., Descriptive and Surgical Anatomy and Supplement. 
7 
Clinical Medicine, Registrar; J. A. Ireland, M. D., Obstetrics 
and Gynecology, Dean ; L. D. Kastenbine, A. M., M. D., Chem- 
istry and Urinology; Turner Anderson, M. D., Materia Medica 
and Therapeutics; Edward Miller, M. D., Principles and Prac- 
tice of Surgery, Secretary; W. H. Galt, M. D., Principles and 
Practice of Medicine; James M. Holloway, M. D., Clinical and 
Operative Surgery ; Sam. Cochran, M. D., Physiology. Demon- 
strators : Sam. Cochran, M. D., Anatomy; George M. Warner, 
M. D., Materia Medica and Practice of Medicine; H. B. Ritter, 
M. D., Obstetrics and Gynecology; Wm. T. Carter, M. D., Dis- 
eases of Children. 
By these I shall prove beyond all possible question every 
charge I have made, and, having done so, I shall simply ask 
the same verdict which was rendered in May, 1877, against the 
same offender for the same crimes. I shall be content with this; 
for I am exposing measures, not men. 
In order that it may be seen that the Louisville Medical Col- 
lege is guilty of practices which are disreputable in themselves 
and subversive of many of the best interests of the profession, 
I ask attention to a few letters, selected at random from innu- 
merable specimens at hand, which were addressed to medical 
students in Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, 
Arkansas, Texas, etc. Every letter of the many I have bears 
the official imprint of the Louisville Medical College, and con- 
tains a wood-cut of its building, a list of its entire faculty and 
the names of its trustees. 
I take a letter of the Secretary of the Faculty first. He writes: 
Louisville Medical College, 1 
Louisville, Ky., August 10, 1883. J 
Dear Sir—I send you to-day one of our catalogues. You will see 
therein that our regular fee is $80, but, under the circumstances, I 
will receive you for one half the regular fee—that is, $40—so that 
your entire college expenses, including the graduation fee, will be 
$70. As soon as you reach the city, call upon Dr. Kelly or my- 
self, corner of Second and Green streets, and you will at once be 
shown to a boarding-house, and thus save hotel bill. We will be 
happy to see you, and will do our best to make you feel at home. 
Very respectfully, 8 
Supplement. 
The Secretary of the Faculty reduces the regular fee by one 
half, while the Professor of Physiology is a little less liberal and 
demands fifty dollars:- 
Louisville Medical College, l 
Louisville, Ky., Aug. 15, 1883. J 
Dear Sir—A friend writes me that you purpose attending medical 
lectures. I write to present to you the claims of Louisville—the med- 
ical center of the South and West, the healthiest large city in America, 
beyond the reach of yellow fever, etc. Good board, costing else- 
where $20 to $30, can be had here for $12 to $15 per month. 
Owing to our great Exposition, railroad rates will be only half rate. 
No school has better facilities for medical teaching than the Louisville 
Medical College. I send you catalogue. As I am allowed a certain 
number of beneficiaries for your State, I will take you as one, and 
charge you only $50 instead of $80. With this reduction, cheapness 
of board, and reduced railroad fare, you can attend one of the best 
schools for less money than an inferior one. Let me hear from you, 
and send names of other medical students, and oblige yours, etc., 
The Demonstrator of Obstetrics seems to have been ac- 
corded the privilege of admitting students on the same terms 
as those offered by the Secretary of the Faculty—forty dollars— 
as is shown in the following: 
Louisville Medical College. 
My Dear Sir—A friend writes me that you purpose attending med- 
ical lectures. I write to present the claims of Louisville—the medical 
center of the South and West, the healthiest large city in America. 
Owing to our Exposition, railroad fare to Louisville will be only one 
half rate. Good board, costing elsewhere $20 to $30, can be had here 
for $12 to $15 per month. No school has better facilities for med- 
ical teaching than the Louisville Medical College. As I am allowed 
a certain number of beneficiaries from your State, I will take you as 
one, and charge you only $40 instead of $80. With this reduction, 
cheapness of board, and reduced railroad fare, you can attend one of 
the best schools for less money than an inferior one. Let me hear 
from you, and send names of other students. 
Very truly yours, 
The Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology being perhaps 
too busily engaged in casting the beneficiary drag-net over some Supplement. 
9 
more remote State, confided the State of Tennessee to the 
Demonstrator of Chemistry. As no such officer appears in the 
advertisement of the school—from which the copy on a fore- 
going page was made—it is proper, lest I should be accused of 
inaccuracy, to say that the office is found in the faculty letter- 
heads, and is filled by Sam. E. Woody, A. M., M. D., and he 
writes this letter: 
Louisville Medical College, ] 
Louisville, Ky., August 4, 1883. J 
Dear Sir—Yours of day before yesterday was handed me this 
morning by Prof. Ireland, for the correspondence of Tennessee is 
usually delegated to me. By this mail I send catalogue. As I am 
allowed a certain number of beneficiaries from your State, I will take 
you as one, and charge you only $50 instead of $80. With this reduc- 
tion in fees, together with the cheapness of living in Louisville, and 
the reduced railroad fare during the Exposition, you can attend one 
of the best schools for less money than an inferior one. Please let 
me hear from you. Send names and addresses of other students. 
Very truly yours, 
The Demonstrator of Materia Medica also has beneficiary 
powers, and writes : „ 
Louisville Medical College, | 
Louisville, Ky., October 24, 1883. I 
Dear Sir—Yours of September 30th received. I send by this 
mail catalogue of Louisville Medical College. If you will send in 
your name at once I can procure a beneficiary fee for you. This will 
be $50 instead of $80, as mentioned in catalogue. Dissecting ticket 
is extra, $10. Board may be had, as stated in circular, for from $12 
to $15. This includes lodging, fire, fuel, water, etc.; washing about 
$1 per month. Let me hear from you at once, in order that your 
name may be registered as a beneficiary. 
Yours respectfully, 
I have now shown copies of letters from two professors and 
three demonstrators. A letter from the fourth demonstrator 
will appear later. 
I shall prove the first and second charges by the following 
extract from the annual advertisement of the Louisville Medical 
College for the session of 1883-1884 : 
“ In recognition of the standard of policy adopted by the Associa- 
tion of American Medical Colleges, convened at Chicago, 111., June 4, 10 
Supplement. 
1877» the Beneficiary provisions will be limited to five per cent of the 
class. The general ticket fee will be $75.00; Matriculation fee $5.00.” 
Lest the foregoing should be thought somewhat ambiguous 
as to what the Registrar of the Louisville Medical College terms 
“the Beneficiary provisions,” I transcribe the law on this subject 
as framed by the Association of American Medical Colleges: 
The same fees may be reduced or remitted to deserving, indigent 
students, to a number not exceeding five per cent of the number of 
matriculates at the previous regular session of the college. 
Under no circumstances whatever other than the above shall the 
faculties, or any members of the same, grant upon their own authority 
any remissions or reductions of established fees. And it is distinctly 
understood and agreed that the faculties will discountenance and 
oppose the authorizing by governing boards of the admission of indi- 
vidual students on other than the regularly established charges for 
their grade. 
This makes “the beneficiary provisions” more easily under- 
stood. If the Louisville Medical College had eighty students 
at the session of 1882-3, it was, by the above compact, which 
it once signed with other colleges, entitled to grant just four 
beneficiary scholarships—no more. And yet its professors and 
demonstrators absolutely vie with each other in scattering these 
“beneficiary provisions,” as they are called by the Registrar, 
from the Lakes to the Gulf. Was ever greater cheek exhibited 
by any institution of learning—by any institution of any kind— 
than that of the Louisville Medical College, which, professing in 
its printed advertisements to yield obedience to the law of the 
Association of Medical Colleges, is actually engaged, from the 
secretary down to the last of the demonstrators, in writing to 
students all over the country, offering to take them at half the 
price charged by neighboring schools ? 
Acknowledging fealty to the behests of the American Asso- 
ciation of Medical Colleges, indeed! IT to publish in its circu- 
lars that “in recognition of the standard of policy adopted by 
the Association of American Medical Colleges convened at Chi- 
cago, June, 1877, the Beneficiary provisions will be limited to Supplement. 
11 
five per cent of the class,” when it would be passing strange if 
out of all its present class five per cent could be found who were 
not beneficiaries ! 
IT to state that it recognizes the policy adopted by the Asso- 
ciation of American Medical Colleges, and with one hand to 
stand and distribute advertisements wherein its charges are 
fixed at eighty dollars, and with the other to indite letters to 
every student of medicine it can hear of, offering its tickets for 
forty dollars, just one half its advertised rates! 
Reader, I know that after following me thus far you are pre- 
pared for almost any thing. No doubt you have about concluded 
that there is nothing the Louisville Medical College could do 
that would surprise you. But wait. I am going to tell you 
something now which would be impossible of belief were there 
not volumes of irrefragable proof and the author was any other 
than the Louisville Medical College. Here it is. 
When the Louisville Medical News, edited now, mark you, 
by two teachers in the University of Louisville, had every letter 
that I have produced, another that I shall use later, and scores 
of others which I hold in reserve, it took occasion in a very 
temperate editorial, which appeared in November last, to call the 
attention of the authors to the evil of their conduct and warn 
them of its consequences. Whereupon the Faculty of the Lou- 
isville Medical College rushed into print in the circular letter I 
have previously mentioned and flatly denied the e7itire charge. 
This denial was made when the Louisville Medical 
College knew that the very proof I am now using for its 
conviction was in possession of the public. 
You ask, was there ever before such assurance? Yes. Who 
displayed it? The Louisville Medical College. When? In 
1876. And in this way. 
For a period of eight years—that is, from its youth up—the 
institution named had engaged in this same “wholesale debauch- 
ery,” as it was styled by the Louisville Medical News—the News, 
mark you, being edited, as I have said, at that time by the late 
Dr. Cowling and the present Professor of the Principles and 12 
Supplement. 
Practice in the Louisville Medical College. [Shall I say that 
the last named editor did not then occupy his present position ?] 
The News openly charged the Louisville Medical College with 
being guilty of this and other iniquities. When lo! that institu- 
tion not only denied the charges from A to izzard, but actually 
branded them as falsehoods, and, to quote from the News, 
“ Such a gush of billingsgate as ensued has never been heard 
since men fed on fish. ‘Abortion,’ ‘coarseness,’ ‘impudence,’ 
* stench in the medical nostrils,’ ‘noisy ass,’ ‘Hottentot,’ were 
some of the milder epithets with which the air was filled. And 
all this against the noble breast of the Louisville Medical News 
for its inveterate habit of telling the truth.” 
The public understood even at that time what weight to attach 
to statements coming from the Louisville Medical College, for 
right on the heels of this charge of falsehood against the News, 
the Medical College Convention spoke thus pointedly of the prac- 
tice for which the News had assailed the Louisville Medical Col- 
lege: “The beneficiary system which is carried to such perfection 
in the school of double diplomas is unqualifiedly condemned”— 
the school of double diplomas as well as beneficiary scholar- 
ships being the Louisville Medical College. 
As still further showing the temper of the professional mind 
concerning this beneficiary business, the Provisional Association 
of American Medical Colleges passed the following whereas and 
resolutions at its meeting held June, 1876, in Philadelphia: 
Whereas, The practice of reducing or remitting in individual cases 
the established fees of a college has the objectionable feature of dis- 
criminating between students who may be equally deserving, and 
opening the door to possible gross abuses; therefore 
Resolved, That this convention regards the above privilege as one 
to be deprecated in general, and, if put into practice at all, to be 
exercised both rarely and reluctantly, and only in unusual circum- 
stances, and after unsolicited application by proven deserving can- 
didates. 
Resolved, That any thing like a wholesale system of such reduc- 
tion or remission of established fees, or any open solicitation of recip- 
ients of such favors, be regarded as in the highest degree improper, and Supplement. 
13 
that any college indulging in such practices deserves to forfeit its 
place on the ad candem list of medical colleges. 
The next four charges I shall establish by the following letter, 
which in its way has no parallel in medical annals, and places 
its writer facile princeps in epistolary literature. For truth and 
modesty it is certainly unrivaled. It alone would establish al- 
most every charge I have made. It was written by the Demon- 
strator of Diseases of Children : 
Louisville Medical College, ) 
Louisville, Ky., August 14, 1883./ 
Dear Sir—Your name has been kindly sent to me by a friend. I 
am not informed at what school you have taken your first course, but 
I am certainly anxious to have you take your last one with the Louis- 
ville Medical College—the foremost school in this country. It has 
graduated hundreds of the most successful practitioners in the world; 
and I am told that you will not fail to add luster to its name, should 
you wisely consent to complete your education here. This school 
has many important features possessed by no other school in the 
world, and has never been equaled as a brilliant instructor. 
A limited number of beneficiary tickets will be issued to Kentucky 
students this fall. Now, if you wish to avail yourself of this favor, 
call upon me, or write at your earliest convenience. 
The stage-coach from your place passes by my house. If you will 
stop as you come in town, you will certainly never regret having done 
so. The reputation you will acquire by graduating at the Louisville 
Medical College will aid you in obtaining a practice wherever you 
locate. Your preceptor will lose interest in you as soon as you locate 
and become his competitor for practice; but this school will assist 
you, if you need it, until you become, what all young men should 
strive to be, the best of good physicians. Call and become acquainted 
with the plan of instruction pursued by the Louisville Medical College. 
Believe me your friend, 
I shall not consume time by making copies of other letters, 
all of the same tenor, most in the same stereotyped style, and all 
signed by either professors or demonstrators in the Louisville 
Medical College. I have already said that I have numbers of 
them on file. 14 
Supplement. 
I would fain rest my case here, for I have no further stomach 
for this miserable business. But the same sense of duty which 
led me to undertake the painful task urges me to its completion. 
The next witness I shall introduce is the Professor of the 
Principles and Practice of Medicine in the Louisville Medical 
College, by whom I shall prove the remaining charges. I shall 
allow him to tell in his own way what he thought in 1876 and 
1877 of the school in which he now holds a chair—to tell in his 
own pointed words what he thought of the very practices of 
which, to the mortification of his many friends, be it said, he 
now declares himself to be the champion and defender. I shall 
not ask him to repeat all he said at the time referred to, for 
that would require page upon page to be added to an article 
already much too long. 
He wrote in 1876 and 1877 that— 
The Louisville School, in its desperate efforts to fill its benches, 
leaves no stone unturned. 
“Certain medical schools which annually flood this country with what 
they term ‘ scholarships ’ or beneficiary certificates, or some kind of positively 
irregular solicitations—or, as the students in their letters to other deans term 
them, ‘ inducements ’—to students to attend their lectures. This college has 
sent circulars to our janitor for distribution among our class while in actual 
attendance upon lectures, and ‘scholarshipsor ‘ beneficiary tickets,’ to others 
of our students. ” 
The News copies this from another journal and asks ‘Who 
it can be ?’ Need the reader be told who ? 
“ Mr. Sale, the first witness, stated that it was the habit of this 
school to take students at even a lower figure than he had paid; in 
short, that students are taken at any price they choose to pay. In 
corroboration of this, Sale produced a letter signed by Dr. Gaillard, 
Dean of the Faculty, to a young man in Canada, offering to take him 
through a whole course of lectures for twenty-five dollars, and it is 
claimed that by the use of such means as these the Louisville Medical 
College has been enabled to swell its list of students to its present 
proportions. 
They are not only bringing the profession into disgrace, but are 
doing great mischief to many innocent young men whom they have 
deluded into their snares. Supplement. 
15 
We shall look to it that men who advertise over their “ official sig- 
natures ” for takers for these plausible documents shall know exactly 
what they are doing. 
We owe it not only to the profession to attempt to stop this flood- 
gate, but to many honest young men who are being seduced by such 
plausible means to earn diplomas of which they can not in after life 
but be ashamed. 
By an artfully contrived system of beneficiary scholarships modern 
medical schools are built up, and their benches are filled with students. 
How long does he think that it would be before the profession 
would be contemptible, especially if all should go to work flooding 
the country with “beneficiary scholarships,” urging students to accept 
a medical education as a gratuity ? Does any one believe that the 
honor of the profession could survive such a policy ? 
The Deluded Beneficiaries.—The beneficiaries are continuing to 
arrive in the city—not in the same numbers as they did before the 
News began to expose the sham, but there are still far too many of 
them for the dignity of medicine, or, indeed, of manhood. 
In contemplating this miserable beneficiary sham, one can but ask 
with the editor of the Richmond and Louisville Medical Journal, in 
the issue for January, 1869, By what principle of ethics are dishonor- 
able practices in the doctor honorable in the teacher ? 
“ What the Bi-Weekly [the organ of the Louisville Medical Col- 
lege] charged, and continues to charge, is that for a year or more the 
'News’ published in almost every issue statements in regard to the 
Louisville Medical College which are not true. The statements were 
known to the ‘News’ to be untrue, and yet they were persistently 
and interminably published,” etc. 
“ Was it a falsehood to say that the beneficiary system of the 
Louisville School was the hollowest sham of the century ? Are 
there three men in the school who are not beneficiaries? 
“Was it a falsehood to say that the blather in which the Louisville 
circulars indulge about its being a high-fee school was ‘ conspicuously 
absurd?’ Does n’t it make you laugh? 
“ Do not the most of the students who go there feel called on to 
apologize for doing so ? 
“ We have produced demonstrative proof for all we have said.” 
It does seem unnecessary for us to enter into any argument to 
convince professional readers of the evils of this system; it seems 
too patent. 16 
Supplement. 
The profession should certainly take the trouble to understand 
the matter. It is interested in stopping this wholesale debauchery. 
It can have no interest in pulling the drag-net which is to gather men 
so indiscriminately into its ranks. Students of medicine should know 
what is in store for them should they accept these singular gifts. 
They are to be branded as paupers. 
In an open letter addressed by the News to the College Con- 
vention when it was about to assemble in 1877 it said : 
“Any decision in regard to fees will be but an utter farce if it 
does not provide for the control of beneficiary scholarships. This 
journal has thoroughly exposed one of the most hideous forms in 
which the scholarship system is run. The convention could strike a 
double blow at this cunning piece of machinery by presenting it to the 
consideration of the Association and publishing to the people at large 
the discreditable work they are being seduced into doing. If it suc- 
ceeds in doing nothing else than disposing of this sham in a satis- 
factory manner, the convention will justify its sitting.” We leave it 
to your superior w'isdom to find out a plan by which the really worthy 
and moneyless are to be provided for, other than by the wholesale 
system of debauchery at present indulged in by some.” 
Although the witness has by no means exhausted his utter- 
ances on “ the miserable beneficiary sham,” he has surely said 
enough for the present. Hear him now on the name of the 
Louisville Medical College: 
The Ultimatum of the News: You should not, as you have done 
during the last seven years, imitate the title of another institution. 
You well know that three out of four of the men who receive the 
catalogues and scholarships of the “Louisville Medical College” 
very naturally suppose it is the “University of Louisville” which has 
issued them, and the suspicion that the name was adopted for a purpose 
has been very well founded. 
About the same time he declared— 
We fight for the common good of the profession, and we feel that 
we ought every where to be upheld. 
We have felt all along that in our attempts to expose the state 
of affairs which exists in the Louisville School we labored under the Supplement. 
17 
disadvantage of proving too much. The professional mind is slow to 
believe that such an enormity could exist any where. 
The most charitable construction to put upon the actions of the 
Louisville School would be to regard them as those of an irrespon- 
sible being. If they do not condemn it to an asylum, they certainly 
should lodge it in a medical calaboose. 
We have been obliged to lecture it and warn the community against 
it for a year past. Should we ever succeed in getting it straight, we 
will let you know; but in the mean time have nothing to do with it. 
Said the salutatorian of the class on the evening of the com- 
mencement, “The Louisville Medical College is inferior to no similar 
institution in this country.” We ask, is there from Alaska to the 
Florida Reefs an institution similar to the Louisville Medical College ? 
We have proved all these things. 
The reward has been that scarcely two years have passed by, and 
the enemy here has been made a laughing-stock all over the country, 
and is in the throes of dissolution. 
He then addresses a few words'to the teachers in the Louis- 
ville Medical College which we commend to the present faculty; 
There is no reason in the world why you should not make an hon- 
est living as teachers. There was no occasion for you to do all those 
disreputable things to get students, and you ought not to have allowed 
yourselves to be led into them. Of course we had to stop them. Do 
not be led off again, or rest assured we will come down on you once 
more. 
Will they not learn that special pleadings can not prevail against 
the broad principles of truth; and, seeing now that honor is lost, 
spurn the temptation offered by a miserable pittance to defend a 
wretched cause ? 
We wish them (the faculty) personally every success. We would 
not turn a single dollar from its course toward their pockets. 
[In both which sentiments I join most heartily.] 
But private interests must yield to the public good. 
The News then has the following for the students who were 
inattendance at the Louisville Medical College: 
When you get by yourselves, where outside students can’t see you, 
and forget for a moment how cruelly you have been taken in, don’t 18 
Supplement. 
you kill yourselves laughing at the fearful sell which goes by the 
name of Phenomenon? [Louisville Medical College.] We know you 
do; and we know, too, that when you get safely home in January or 
February you are going to quit, then and there. 
The next paragraph foreshadows the early surrender of the 
Louisville Medical College, and the News begins to soften, its 
declarations to the contrary notwithstanding. 
We felt we had dealt the Phenomenon such blows that it must 
surely die. It was painful to us to invite against it its own blades. 
“We have got it,” says the News, “apparently into the College 
Association. We care very little about the blather it utters about 
wanting all this sort of thing, and being sorry that it did n’t go fur- 
ther. We know humbug when we see it, especially when we look at 
it for seven years or so. We know how polite the word humbug can 
be. We have hammered it for months to our heart’s and readers’ con- 
tent. We have said every thing we could possibly say about it, and 
proved it. We have run it into its hole.” 
If he will surrender these assumed privileges and get some respon- 
sible party to go on his bond for him, we will not only let him come 
out, but will divide our commissariat with him. We have not a 
bloodthirsty feeling in our bosom, and long for a return of peace. 
The formal surrender of the Phenomenon occurred soon after, 
when the News wrote : 
We are willing—nay, anxious—to extend to it a helping hand until 
it gets fairly started along the paths of decency. 
We have succeeded before another bar—that of professional opin- 
ion—in condemning the former practices of the Louisville Medical 
College, and leading it into better paths. 
It would be unfair to truth if I omitted to state that the 
News was the one and chief enemy of the Louisville Medical 
College throughout. All the time this sheet was engaged in 
warring on that institution, one of its editors, the witness, was a 
simple practitioner of medicine, connected with no medical 
school whatever. He claimed to be, and evidently was, with- 
out bias or prejudice attacking pretence, charlatanry, and deceit 
in whatever place and shape they were found in the profession. Suppleme7it. 
19 
A bold champion of the right, fighting for a higher medical 
education, a higher grade of medical students, a higher stand- 
ard of morals in medical schools, and inculcating a better life 
in all ranks, he shared with Professor Cowling the perils and 
the glories of the campaign which he helped to conduct. And 
when at its close he resigned his editorial seat, he took with 
him the thanks of the profession for the part he had borne in 
the struggle. 
Six years later—I write it with infinite pain—he, while hold- 
ing a professorship in the Louisville Medical College and editing 
its organ, the Medical Herald, publishes that “ The Louisville 
Medical College has been pursued in the Past by as able a body 
OF PERJURERS, MENDACIOUS SCRIBBLERS, AND UNSCRUPULOUS 
SLANDERERS AS EXIST IN THE LAND.” 
This from him ! 
I will stop here. I set out to expose the character, ante- 
cedents, and practices of the institution which, in the newspaper 
press, in a circular letter, and in the columns of its organ, the 
Medical Herald, has assailed the University of Louisville for 
having asked it in a courteous way to cease to do evil jind learn 
to do right. I submit that I have done so. 
DAVID W. YANDELL. 
Louisville, Ky.