American Medical Biographies/Bell, Theodore Stout
Bell, Theodore Stout (1807–1884)
Theodore Stout Bell the son of John Tingley Bell and Rachel Stout Bell was born in Lexington, Kentucky, beginning life as a newsboy and later, after a six years' apprenticeship, working as a tailor. While so doing he studied medicine and in 1832 graduated at the Transylvania University, the same year he moved to Louisville and began practice. He was largely instrumental in the creation of the Medical Institute in 1837, which afterwards became the University of Louisville. He wrote voluminously in behalf of the development of the city, and especially public improvements. He was a liberal contributor to the editorial and correspondence department of the Louisville Journal, made famous throughout the Union by the gifted George D. Prentice. In 1838, in connection with Dr. L. P. Yandell, Sr. (q.v.), he launched the Louisville Medical Journal, and later, 1840– 41, the Western Medical Journal. In 1857 he was made professor of the science and art of medicine and public hygiene, a position held until death.
Bell was a voracious reader on almost all subjects and his memory was phenomenal. He was accustomed to insist that for a student four hours of sleep was enough to meet the requirements of nature. In his later years, after the death of his wife, he was accustomed to keep even his bed piled with books and to read in bed late at night.
He was extremely positive in his views and with him every notion seemed to have the tenacity of a firm conviction. When once he had reached a conclusion, his convictions were so intense that it was well nigh impossible for him to find anything in a new fact that did not have to bend to his formed opinion.
In medicine he set great store on a theory he held that malaria owed its origin to vegetable decomposition with heat and moisture, and it embraced all forms of ague, bilious fever, dysentery, cholera and yellow fever. A certain definite measure of heat with vegetable decomposition produced progressively quartan, tertian and quotidian agues, then followed in order, bilious fever, dysentery, cholera and yellow fever.
So positively and plausibly did he urge this theory, that in 1852 a committee of the British Medical Association under the chairmanship of Lord Shaftesbury, sought his views on the probable date of the appearance of cholera in that year. In the yellow-fever epidemic of 1873, Bell persuaded the people of Louisville that it was impossible for yellow fever to exist in the city, and induced them to invite there all of the Southern refugees. Grateful for being led to a move so generous and popular, the citizens voted him a medal of honor, but scarcely had it been conferred, when a virulent epidemic of yellow fever broke out in the city, and only an early frost prevented disaster. Despite the assertion of his theories and his profuse invectives in controversy, Dr. Bell was most kindly in his personal relations and full of charity and benevolence. He was passionately concerned for the welfare of the state institutions for the blind, and it was through his influence and labor as president of its board of visitors from 1871–80 that it was made one of the foremost institutions of its kind in America.
In 1861 he was made president of the Kentucky branch of the United States Sanitary Commission. It was while assisting this work at Shiloh, caring for the sick and wounded, that his wife, who was Susanne Hewitt, a woman of many charms whom he had married in 1833, contracted a sickness from which she never recovered. They had only one son, Hewitt, who died a year before his father.
Dr. Bell was strongly antagonistic to calomel. At first he was a follower of his teacher, Prof. John Esten Cooke (q.v), the originator of the famous Cooke's pills, but having lost some of his patients in a horrible condition of salivation, he turned against mercury with all his ardent nature and afterwards sent out many a class of students sharing his aversion. His writings included:
"On E. S. Gaillard, M. D., editor of the Richmond and Louisville Medical Journal, professor of general pathology and pathological anatomy in the Kentucky School of Medicine"; a lecture upon the "Pre-historic Ages of Scandinavia and of the Lacustrine Dwellers of Switzerland, in Connection with the Progress of Mankind under Divine Guidance," Louisville, 1869; "A Pseudo-critic Unmasked," in a review of the writings of E. S. Gaillard, Louisville, 1869, reprinted from Nashville Journal of Medicine and Surgery, 1869; memorial address upon "The Life and Service of Lunsford Pitts Yandell, M. D." Louisville, Kentucky, 1878.