Background
John Esten Cooke was the first of eight children born to Dr. Stephen Cooke of Philadelphia. His father was a surgeon in the Revolutionary War, who was captured by the British and taken to the Bermudas, where he married, June 7, 1782, Catherine, daughter of John Esten, chief justice, and at one time acting governor and where their son Henry was born on March 02, 1783. He was the elder brother of John Rogers and Philip St. George Cooke. The family continued to dwell in the Bermudas until 1791 when it moved to Alexandria, Virginia, and later to Leesburg, in Loudoun County in the same state.
Education
Cooke received a good education. He read Latin and used a Greek Testament throughout his life. Having begun the study of medicine under his father in Loudoun County, he obtained his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1805, his graduation thesis, which was published, being devoted to an account of an epidemic of fever that prevailed in his county in 1804.
Career
Cooke practised for years at Warrenton, Virginia, but in 1821 moved to Winchester. His Essays on the Autumnal and Winter Epidemics (1829) which appeared in the Medical Recorder in 1824 attracted much attention. With Dr. McGuire and others he had planned to start a medical college at Winchester, when, in 1827, he was called to the chair of theory and practise of medicine at the Transylvania University Medical School, Lexington, Kentucky, to succeed his old classmate, Daniel Drake.
In the next year he published the first volume of his Treatise on Pathology and Therapeutics, which was later followed by the second volume. This work is said to have been the earliest American systematic text-book on medicine. With C. W. Short he began in the same year the Transylvania Journal of Medicine and the Associate Sciences, and to this journal and the Medical Recorder he contributed sufficient papers to form, had they been republished, a large volume.
His design seems to have been to emancipate the United States from servile dependence on European medicine and to establish an American medical literature, but this attitude was ridiculed by the Eastern leaders of the profession. While in Lexington he changed his old creed of Methodism to Episcopalianism and defended this departure in his Essay on the Invalidity of Presbyterian Ordination (1829). In 1832, when his church established a theological seminary, he was made professor of church history and polity and he also assembled an excellent library for the seminary.
In 1837 he moved to Louisville where he was co-founder of the Louisville Medical Institute, later known as the University of Louisville, and was made its professor of the theory and practise of medicine. He was never popular either with the faculty or the students. He made the liver responsible for most of human ailments and insisted that the chief remedies must be those which act upon that organ. He gave enormous doses of calomel and other purgatives, and he bled his patients freely. His colleague Drake in the chair of clinical medicine opposed such teachings, and Cooke’s withdrawal, which was a foregone conclusion, took place in 1844. The rest of his life was spent on a farm near the Ohio River.
Religion
Cooke was a member of the Episcopalian Church.
Personality
Cooke had a total disregard for the opinions of others and an intolerance toward all that he regarded as error. He took great pains to get at the truth and his reasoning powers were unusual, but he was unable to comprehend that his premises might be at fault.
