Page:Early Indianapolis.djvu/31

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23

his colleagues showed their respect for his memory by wearing bands of crepe on their sleeves for thirty days.

Dr. Jonathan Cool, the best educated of them all, was a Princeton graduate and classmate of Judge Blackford. Dr. Cool made the first protest against the heroic doses of medicine given in those days.

Dr. Livingston Dunlap was the only surgeon in the town until Dr. Sanders came in 1830. Dr. Dunlap served in many civic offices and was professor of theory and practice in the Central Medical College. He had a large practice and his death in 1862 was widely lamented.

Dr. Isaac Coe came to the settlement in the spring of 1821. His home was near the Patterson homestead and the present City Hospital. He is remembered for his free use of calomel and the lancet. Mrs. Jane Merrill Ketcham, one of his patients in her childhood, says “it is no exaggeration to say that his pills were as large as cherries; twenty grains of calomel was a common dose and antimony until one was sure he was poisoned.”

Dr. Coe was a charter member of the First Presbyterian Church, and his many years of service were recalled when, in 1901, the boxes in the corner stone of the church at the southwest corner of Pennsylvania and New York streets were opened on the clearing of the square for the Federal Building. The first box transferred from its resting place in the building of 1843, located on the Circle, contained the history of the church complete from 1821 to 1841 in Dr. Coe’s handwriting, a period covering, among others, the pastorates of the Revs. David C. Proctor, George Bush, William A. Holliday and Phineas D. Gurley. The church history of later years was found in the second box, with the names of the elders of 1866, Thomas H. Sharpe, Thomas MacIntire, William Sheets and Benjamin Harrison. The box also contained