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BIOGRAPHY OF DR. PETER SMITH.*

Close following the frontiersmen, whose footprints were scarcely rubbed out,and whose rifles had not yet been silenced in the territory embracing the OhioValley, came a band of men who cleared away the forest and founded their homesamong the stumps. The subject of this sketch may be numbered among thesepeople. He was a typical Puritan, an educated, stern man, of indomitable will,and religious to the utmost degree.

The end of the War of the Revolution had been consummated before theIndian had departed from the Miami lands, where this man lived. John Filsontramped from Lexington to the Ohio River, laid out the village of Losantiville,afterward Cincinnati, and, venturing too far from the fort, left his bones some-where among the adjacent hills. This happened several years after the subjectof this sketch was married. David Schcepf, the talented scientist, that energeticHessian, who, after the surrender of the British, took his pack on his back andtramped over our land in search of American medicinal plants, had not yetwritten his Materia Medica Americana, which is the first systematic publicationconcerning the American Materia Medica. 1

B. S. Barton, of the University of Pennsylvania, who, in 1798, contributedthe first study of American drugs, from an educational institution, 2 and SamuelThomson 3 the combative champion of lobelia, who fought the dogmatism, as heviewed it, of the medical profession, and introduced the Thomsonian method ofmedication, were contemporaneous with Peter Smith. C. S. R. Rafinesque, 4 thatpicturesque, gifted, erratic, enthusiastic scholar, had not landed in America whenPeter Smith trod the Kentucky path.

Coming into the Ohio Valley from the South that he hated because of itsslavery, preaching the Word of God and practicing medicine, Peter Smith, therepresentative of a class of men who sought neither fame nor gold, and who fearedno privation, made his mark and passed away.

Peter Smith's Dispensatory and Its Recovery. "Peter Smith,the Indian Herb Doctor." The name was familiar during the writer'sboyhood in Kentucky. It lingers yet about Western domestic medicine,and is occasionally seen in orthodox medical print. Rafinesque cited Peter Smith

* Read at the December meeting of the Cincinnati Section of the American Chemical Society.Revised reprint from the American Journal of Pharmacy, January, 1898.

1 "Materia Medica Americana," 1787.

* "Collections for an Essay towards a Materia Medica of the United States," by Benjamin SmithBarton, M. D., 1798. See Bulletin No. 1, Lloyd library.

3 See " A Narrative of the Life and Medical Discoveries of Samuel Thomson," 1822.

* " The Life and Writings of Rafinesque." Prepared for the Pilson Club, Louisville, Ky., and readat its meeting, Monday, April 2, 1894, by Richard Ellsworth Call, M. A., M. Sc, M. D.

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