Ohio History Journal

DANIEL DRAKE AS A PIONEER IN MODERN

ECOLOGY

by ADOLPH E. WALLER

Associate Professor and Curator of the Botanic Garden,

Ohio State University

 

When, in 1895, Warming of Copenhagen summarized his

studies of the coastal dunes of the North Sea, he wakened

biologists to a new point of view. He wrote the word "oecology"

into the record. It soon became widely used as a tool to aid in the

understanding of the complex relations existing between organ-

ism and environment.

As a problem, however dimly recognized, that interrelation-

ship is as old as biology itself. The simple study of wind and

wave action in limiting the populations of bleak seacoasts. be-

came the inspiration for the interpretation of human life in

terms of environment under the more diverse controls presented

in streams, forests, and fields.  Future biological studies will

eventually reveal the complete picture of man's place in nature.

Warming's studies were enthusiastically received in many

places, particularly in the United States. Under Bessey, Pound

and Clements transliterated his idea into the classic Nebraska

Phytogeographic Survey. At the University of Chicago, Cowles

was soon to attract a group of students who carried from their

field work the orderly principles now familiar to ecologists. The

old American Naturalists Society of which Dr. Bessey had been

the first president broke ranks sufficiently to form the American

Ecological Society. Taking over the former Plant World, a new

journal was established.  The ecological movement prospered

because it offered a common meeting ground for the disciplines of

specialized fields in zoology, botany, physiology, meteorology,

soil science, geology, geography and others more or less closely

allied in thinking however much separated by the filing processes

of specialization:

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DANIEL DRAKE AND MODERN ECOLOGY             363

 

Order in nature, even in a jungle, becomes clearer as a

result of bringing the field naturalist into the laboratory for

closer observation of and experimentation with his collected

material. At the same time the taxonomist is induced to study

his types under natural environments. In this process the early

recording of field observations takes its place beside modern

techniques. The old is woven into the new.

The key to much of this altered viewpoint lies in the genetic

and dynamic aspects of living creatures. Only those organisms

in harmony with the outside pattern of forces survive. A few

are able to live under a wide range of conditions. In time, with

heritable variation forming the patterns of distribution, the

geography of plants and animals assumes meaning.

In thus expanding, modern ecology reaches the medical sci-

ences. It is the goal of certain forward looking members of the

medical profession to see generations of health-endowed human

beings. With a study of the human environment applied to hu-

manity and to the problem of living, the future does not seem too

dark.

What about Daniel Drake in all of this? The purpose of this

paper is to show that Drake accomplished enough in his highly

original work to be marked as a pioneer in the field of ecology.

Four of his published works, all to be mentioned here, furnish

the evidence of his venturing into studies that comprise a new

field of science. At the time he undertook them the science of

ecology was nameless. These four works will be examined for

the data they contain and for the cumulative value of their infer-

ences and conclusions. Thus the reader will be able to form his

own independent judgment of the value of Drake's words.

The briefest of these but the first in chronology is Drake's

Notices Concerning Cincinnati. Published in 1810, it is now a rare

specimen in collectors' libraries. The topics represent first-hand

observations of what he considered the fundamental factors of

human living. He drew largely on the background of his boy-

hood years when he helped his father clear the forests near May's

Lick, Kentucky, in order to set up a farm home in the wilderness.

The hard work of felling trees and moving logs was performed

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364 OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

also by other boys and other fathers who were poor, but in Daniel

Drake's case after the labor was done, its recollection became a

history for all the others. Among the topics included in the

Notices were the topography, the geology, the climate, the diseases,

and the manner of life of the people in the Ohio Valley.

Drake was 25 years old at the time the Notices appeared.

Five years previously he had spent the winter of 1805-6 as a

medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. He was, for

lack of money, unable to remain long enough to complete the

required subjects for a medical degree. As is well known he

already possessed a medical diploma before going to Philadelphia.

This had been issued to him by his preceptor and friend, Dr.

William Goforth. It was the first medical diploma ever given in

Ohio. It had been earned by Drake, showing convincingly his

ability to decipher the Latin of the few books in Dr. Goforth's

library. Besides obtaining the diploma, Drake became Dr. Go-

forth's partner in the practice of medicine and in the operation of

an apothecary shop which in pioneer days inevitably accompanied

medical practice. Drake had gone first to May's Lick to practice,

but Dr. Goforth wanted him in Cincinnati. In December 1807 he

married Harriet Sisson, the niece and ward of Col. Jared Mans-

field. This important event, occurring when Drake was 22 years

old, made him a completely established citizen of Cincinnati. It

also made him a happy man. Harriet was his constant companion.

She went with him on his professional calls remaining reading in

the gig while he administered to his patients. When he began to

write his notes she was his literary confidant. Drake said of her,

"She seldom wrote but soon manifested that she was an excellent

judge of composition.1

Drake wrote and talked on every occasion that presented

itself. His life with Harriet enabled him to talk himself into an

education. We may safely picture them as the most interested

private commentators on the life of the community. For evi-

dence there is the biographical sketch of Charles Drake in the

volume of letters entitled Pioneer Life in Kentucky. The formal

 

1 Daniel Drake, Pioneer Life in Kentucky. A Series of Reminiscential Letters to

his Children. Edited with Notes and a Biographical Sketch by his Son, Charles Drake

(Cincinnati, 1870), Introduction, xiv.

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DANIEL DRAKE AND MODERN ECOLOGY             365

 

schooling of Daniel Drake was limited, but his home life with

Mrs. Drake offers the simplest and happiest recipe for adult edu-

cation. A devoted couple, Daniel and Harriet were fired with

a desire to attain distinction and were spurred on by inquisitive

minds. They worked to lead the community in which they lived

to better times. A doctor and his wife, while going about on the

duties of his profession, were obliged to contact all classes of

persons. Automatically they were news gatherers. And these

two were keen observers and philosophers as well. The result of

this collaboration was the Notices.

So great a value was placed by the people of Cincinnati on the

Notices that in 1815 Drake found time to enlarge it to a volume

of 250 pages. This second work bore the title of The Picture of

Cincinnati. Much better known than the first book, it too has

become a great rarity among book collectors' items. It presented

some statistics of population and the industries of the metropolis

of the West. Of special interest in this account of Drake's work

is the section called "The Forests of the Miami Country." Here

Drake listed the trees he knew, dividing them into sixty genera

and about a hundred species, together with certain undetermined

forms.  Carried away by his personal enthusiasm he wrote a

lengthy note under Aesculus and described the Ohio Buckeye mis-

takenly under a new name, Ae. maxima. This was an unfortunate

accident, for after all it was Drake who gave the nickname "Buck-

eye State" to Ohio. It was a bowl carved of buckeye wood from

which he served the famous punch at the social gatherings that

convened at his house to discuss the important events of the young

State of Ohio. It was his symbol of gracious living.

Listing plants that were useful in medicine and the arts, he

named thirteen stimulants, eight tonics, seven astringents, nine

emetics, six cathartics, three diuretics, three anthelmintics, two

demulcents, and fifteen as plants furnishing dyes or other useful

substances. This is quite a list, and it was handy for apothecary

or housewife unable in those days of uncertain shipment of sup-

plies from abroad to purchase from well-stocked corner drug

stores. For each plant he gave a Latin name, a common name,

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366 OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

and the part of the plant used for its particularly valued sub-

stance.

He had, in common with other botanical manuals of the day,

a "Calendar of Flora." This is the earliest phenological record

for Ohio. It specified various events in the changing aspects of

a plant during its active period of life. He told his readers that

the given dates represented the mean terms of several years' ob-

servation. The earliest date was March 5, when the commons

began to turn green. The latest date was October 30, when the

woods had become leafless. He omitted mention of plants which

remained green through the winter months and of the fact that

dandelions were to be found in bloom in Ohio during any month

of the twelve. Perhaps dandelions were rarities in Drake's day.

Since all his records were the result of first-hand observation, it

is clear that Daniel and Harriet Drake were using all of the time

between visits to the sick in a highly objective way.

Dr. William Kellerman offered the following note on Drake in

the "Catalogue of Ohio Plants": "As making the first though a

small contribution to the botanical literature of Ohio, Dr. Daniel

Drake of Cincinnati is to be mentioned."2 As evidence of the

paucity of botanical work at that time it may be said that not

until 1834 and 1835, when John L. Riddell published, respectively

his work on the flora of Franklin County and the synopsis of the

flora of the western states, was there any more complete work on

Ohio botany than Drake's. Further the modern ecologist would

recognize the difference between a catalog, such as Riddell pre-

pared, and Drake's attempt to educate people to examine the plants

as living things.

Drake was not interested in a mere compendium. With the

little knowledge that he had, he nevertheless instinctively grasped

what is now called the indicator value of plants. A plant was to

be found in its place because of all places that one presented the

sequence of events related to its life cycle. Drake was inquisitive

about geographic facts since these were vitally important as a clue

to human activities. His Picture of Cincinnati presented his dis-

coveries throughout the area he defined as Miami Country. He

 

2 Ohio Geological Survey, Report, VII (Norwalk, 1893), Pt. 2, 56-57.

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DANIEL DRAKE AND MODERN ECOLOGY             367

 

marshaled all the facts at his disposal and called his discussion

"Medical Topography."

The well-informed reader of today would quickly notice the

inadequacy of Drake's information. He would at the same time

admire Drake's originality in summing up relationships between

organism and environment. For it can be seen that in this book

there is born for Drake the concept of health and disease as re-

actions between living beings and the conditions of life. Drake

missed the chance to become a founding father of ecology not be-

cause his writing is not clear, but because he lacked during his

time an appreciative and responsive audience. The only laboratory

training and the only experimentation of his day were weak and

wholly detached from his way of thinking. His Picture of Cin-

cinnati is not only an expansion of the subject matter of his earlier

work; it contains also a philosophic outlook that antedates the

modern ecologists by nearly a century.

Once the idea of indigenous disease had taken root in Drake's

mind it became a subject to which his reflections drew him many

times. It was this work, the Picture of Cincinnati, that attracted

the attention of the medical faculty on the occasion of Drake's

second visit to Philadelphia. It led to the unusual circumstance

of the faculty holding a special convocation assembled for the

single purpose of granting him a medical degree. Such action is

without a parallel in modern times. Drake's enthusiasm for his

ideas had carried over to his Philadelphia professors.

He was not, however, to pursue the subject at once. He

arranged to join the medical faculty at Transylvania University.

It was his plan to spend the winter months teaching in Lexington

and to attend his private practice in Cincinnati during the rest of

the year. He went to Lexington in the autumn of 1817 and

remained until April. It is said that he was disappointed. In

any event, when he returned in the spring to Cincinnati, he had

decided that if he were to become the great leader in medical

education he pictured himself to be, he must build up a college in

Ohio.

To visualize the leadership of Drake at this period it is

necessary to recall that the State of Ohio had a population of

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368  OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

some 400,000 souls, with Cincinnati, a small, backwoods town of

7,000, its leading settlement. Transportation was primarily the

river traffic with steamboats arriving every day to augment the

number of citizens. It was not until after 1812, when British

domination of the Great Lakes came to an end, that the northern

half of the State expanded.   Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Marietta,

Cincinnati, and Louisville were the main centers of industry along

the arterial highway afforded by the Ohio River. The coastal

states from Massachusetts to Virginia furnished the emigrants.

Stories of the fabulous wealth of the Ohio Valley were current

in all of the older centers, and if Cincinnati, the Queen City of

the West, was not the final stopping point, it was the gateway to

the West and the South. In this hurly-burly of commerce, finan-

cial uncertainty, lack of cultural and religious solidarity, Drake

planned a center of medical education and determined to appeal

to the state legislative assembly for funds. Altruism was the

predominant motive, but with himself as the chief figure in the

college, personal ambition followed closely after.

It is not necessary to review here the facts connected with

the founding of the Ohio Medical College. Drake's personal

success in pleading his cause before the House of Representatives

in Columbus netted a grant of $10,000 from the state legislature.

The mistake of making the faculty also the trustees resulted in

the expulsion of Drake a year after the college was established.

The long polemic battle that followed consumed most of

Drake's energies during the next twenty years. Separated from

teaching in the medical field and committed to a guerrilla war

against his former associates, he occupied himself with founding

competing educational enterprises. Among these the Western

Museum and the western teachers association are outstanding.

Other activities leaving a cultural imprint were his numerous

public addresses, his return for four years to the Transylvania

faculty, his two successive foundings of medical colleges (with

their brilliant assemblage of teachers) set up primarily as rival

institutions to the Ohio Medical College, his social gatherings at

his home around the glowing Buckeye Bowl (from which grew

his great interest in the North-South political debates), and his

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DANIEL DRAKE AND MODERN ECOLOGY             369

 

interest in the construction of a railway from Cincinnati to

Charleston, South Carolina.

Mrs. Drake died in 1825 and his devotion to his family was

increased, though Drake's household would have probably pre-

sented its own peculiar problems of domestic tyranny. As a public

speaker he always fired his audience with enthusiasm. His printed

addresses have frequently been styled as models of succinct,

powerful delivery. He was unquestionably at the top of his

profession. When, in 1827, he became the editor of the Western

Medical and Physical Journal he received national recognition.

His address in Lexington in 1833 to the Literary Convention of

Kentucky has been cited as one of the most brilliant and at the

same time the most disturbing of his political efforts foreshadow-

ing the War between the States.

With the acceptance of a call from the Louisville Medical

Institute after the final dissolution of the medical department of

the Cincinnati College in 1839, Drake ceased to be a man con-

stantly in rebellion. The ten years of his teaching in Louisville

were the longest period of attachment to the same institution in

his lifetime. They were his least violent also.

Engaged during the scholastic year in lecturing and in writing,

with his children now establishing families of their own, Drake

was able in summers to travel. This he followed as systematically

and with the same zestful enthusiasm he had previously devoted

to all of his other activities.

He was collecting the data for his magnum opus. During all

the years of interruptions he had not forgotten the main theme

that health and disease are linked to environment. Now that the

hectic merry-go-round of founding colleges, of thwarted ambition,

of quarrels with mediocrity, was behind him, the real Drake was

at last free. His life had been lifted to the level of the impersonal.

Drake was 55 years of age when he started to work on the

Principal Diseases of the Interior Valley of North America. He

still attacked his subject with the freshness and the originality that

had gone into his Notices and into the Picture of Cincinnati. The

plan of the book he had discussed with many friends, and he had

issued two circular pamphlets telling of his intentions and asking

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370  OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

cooperation. The topography and climate, as in the earlier works,

were given first consideration.

Health and disease are also related to ways of living. This

was given second consideration. Lastly, the records of disease

obtained from the medical practitioners in each community were

to form the completed picture. Here then was the nucleus of the

great work that Drake was to perform single-handed. Today,

with the statistical knowledge of geologists, meteorologists, botan-

ists, and topographers to furnish the physical background, with

sociologists and economists to detail how people live, and with

public boards of health keeping an accurate picture of the welfare

of the people, the stubborn folly of attempting such vast labor is

only too apparent. A pioneer's life is always a gamble to those

unwilling to chance it.

Drake's method was inevitable. He wanted to make his own

observations and to meet and talk with people in all the area he

proposed to cover. It was unavoidable that he do so personally

if he was to learn the facts he needed for his book. Drake's

preface told the story: "The object proposed in the following

work is to give an account of the causes, symptoms, pathology,

and treatment of the principal diseases of an extensive portion of

North America . . . its Interior Valley. In exploring it, for the

purpose of collecting facts, the author endeavored to leave behind

him all opinions but the single one, that he who would observe

correctly, must have no theories to maintain or destroy."3

No theories, only the bare facts, with the habits of a lifetime

of pleading causes behind him? Geographical facts, topographical

ones, were unarguable, but what discerning reader among his con-

temporaries could expect a work from Drake's pen not to be filled

with his own ideas. Colorless writing could not have been Drake's.

He applied to all the sources available, he employed the best engi-

neers to furnish maps with which his book is generously illus-

trated, and he quoted accurately and fully the authors he read and

the people with whom he spoke. But the voice is still Drake's.

He traveled at least 30,000 miles during the ten years, jour-

neying from Mexico to Lake Superior and from the Alleghanies

 

3 Daniel Drake, Principal Diseases of the Interior Valley of North America (Cin-

cinnati, 1850).

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DANIEL DRAKE AND MODERN ECOLOGY             371

 

to the Rocky Mountains. What about theories of continental gla-

ciation?  He observed granite boulders far from  parent-rock

material. He spoke of post-Tertiary materials. He unified and

arranged his facts. He showed that the youngest alluvial deposits

are around the Gulf of Mexico and that ancient and primitive

rocks stretch northward from Lake Superior to the polar seas.

What value did he place on his tables of temperature, of baro-

metric pressure, of wind, of rain, and of the distribution of plants

and animals if these are not all subservient to his basic theory

that diseases proceed from physical causes, and that a knowledge

of such causes is necessary to a physician's work in each com-

munity?

Whether Drake was writing with tongue in cheek or not, he

offered the assurance that the distribution of plants and animals

over the continent may be taken as the most unerring indication

of its climatic variations. This could almost have been written by

our ecologists of today as a modern concept. Drake's words4

have been paraphrased here, but he was plainly theorizing.

He took facts with the curiosity of a cub reporter. He pre-

sented them with the skill of a senior editor profiting by his years

of journalistic experience in great sweeps and summaries. After

dealing with hydrography and the configuration of the landscape,

he presented a section of the Valley from Fremont's Peak in the

Rocky Mountains to Bekman Mountain in Virginia. This curve

passes across the Ohio River near the Falls at Louisville, and he

thus was able to bring together the geographic data most familiar

to him. All of his data was enlivened by remarks made while on

the scene.

In a section called physiological and social etiology, he re-

viewed the sources of immigration and, with a distinctly midwest-

ern point of view, he described the Great Valley as the last crucible

of amalgamation of human society. Historians have not yet tapped

the gold mine of his skillful editorship.

He criticized the food habits of the period saying that every-

where people ate too much. This, he claimed, was the natural

result of the great quantities of sustenance produced. He enu-

 

4 Ibid., 636.

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372 OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

merated the vicious modes of cooking which only ended, he said,

in the spoiling of the excellent basic materials. Conservationists

will squirm to learn that these abuses have come to mean the

wastage of our inherited soil treasury. Most people, he declared,

tried to make up for the bad cookery by eating a great variety

of foods.

He approved neither alcoholic beverages nor milk.     He

thought tea more wholesome than coffee and preferred black tea

to green. Yet he, in common with visitors to the market district

in the New Orleans of today praised the coffee served with hot

milk. Commercial pursuits, exercises, recreations, bathing, lodg-

ings, apparel, heating, ventilation, bed coverings, and shade trees

all form part of the human environment; all are therefore included

in his treatise. Some several hundred pages were produced from

statistics and descriptive comments before he was ready to discuss

the incidence of disease.

Referring to his work on cholera of 1832,⁵ he added that he

was ready to ascribe autumnal fever to living organic forms. He

enlarged on a vegeto-animalcular hypothesis.  The pathologist's

rules for tracing a disease to a particular organism were not yet

available, of course. His interesting discussion, not acceptable

today, was forward-looking although inconclusive. The next three

decades of research inspired by Claude Bernard, Pasteur, and Koch

were to furnish answers to some of Drake's questions.

The second volume of Daniel Drake's treatise was published

posthumously having been prepared for the press by Drs. Han-

bury Smith of Starling Medical and Francis Smith of Pennsyl-

vania College. Of the 968 pages of this part of the work only

163 had been made ready for publication before Drake's death.

There remains time for only the briefest remarks about an-

other of Drake's contributions to ecology. It was given as a series

of letters to his children written at the same time he was bringing

his treatise materials together. Edited by Charles Drake, M.D.,

it forms an autobiography.⁶ It has been referred to as the source

of material on Drake's early life. Drake's humor, his appreciation

 

5 A Practical Treatise on the History, Prevalence, and Treatment of Epidemic

Cholera (Cincinnati, 1832), 180.

6 Pioneer Life in Kentucky. See fn. 1.

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DANIEL DRAKE AND MODERN ECOLOGY               373

 

of nature, his sensitive response to beauty, his joy in accomplish-

ment are all woven into the story of the wilderness. Drake was

born October 20, 1785. His privations in the face of parental

poverty, his readiness to rise to emergencies, his unending love

for his parents and for his wife are all captured and passed on to

his children in charming and informal letters. Perhaps from their

appeal to scientist and historian we may hope that some day they

may be made available to a large circle of readers who are eager

to learn the early chronicles in the building of America.

Drake's work, it may be said in summary, is unknown to the

ecologists because it was forgotten by the medical students. The

rise of modern pathology rendered obsolete his speculations as to

the causes of epidemic fevers. His search for these causes and

the chronicles of his time are, however, a valuable source of first-

hand observation.

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