Glock, Richard A.

A North Carolinian by birth, the physician and medical educator Charles Caldwell paired extraordinary talent with an equally extraordinary capacity for alienating his colleagues. As a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania in 1793, Caldwell volunteered at the emergency hospital at Bush Hill during the yellow fever epidemic, and sided with the controversial heroic therapeutic of his teacher, Benjamin Rush. But it was not long before Caldwell began to cut his own path, theoretically and stylistically. In his dissertation in 1796, he attacked Rush directly in attempting to demonstrate that the three phenomena of fever were all the same, and although the strain placed on their relationship was only temporary, it provided a taste of a pugnacious style and propensity for bitter attack that became the hallmarks of Caldwell's career.

Frozen out of a position at the University of Pennsylvania due to his clash with Rush, Caldwell began piecing together a distinguished career in medicine and natural history in Philadelphia, and although he made few friends in the profession, he was accepted as a major figure in the city's medical establishment. Elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1796, he joined the Academy of Medicine (the organization formed in opposition to the College of Physicians and to Rush) and the Philadelphia Medical Society, among other organizations, and was selected to deliver clinical lectures at the Almshouse between 1805 and 1811.

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