e Channel to observe
surgery as practiced in London. While there he listened to Abernethy as
he dwelt with all his wonted enthusiasm on his peculiar doctrine. He
heard him reason it; he saw him act it, dramatize it, and came away
believing him to be "the highest authority on all points relating to
surgery, as at once the observant student of nature, the profound
thinker, and the sound medical philosopher." He always referred to him
as the greatest of surgeons. He saw Sir Astley Cooper operate, and
habitually designated him as the most skilled and graceful man in his
work he had ever known.

He returned to Lexington in the summer of 1814, "in manners a Frenchman,
but in medical doctrine and practice thoroughly English." The public was
quick to detect that he had improved his time while away. "His
profession had become the engrossing object of his thought, and he
applied himself to it with undeviating fidelity. He made himself its
slave." One who knew him well wrote of him: "He had no holidays. He
sought no recreation; no sports interested him. His thoughts, he had
been heard to say, were always on his cases, and not on the objects and
amusements around him." He found Lexington in the midst of an epidemic
of typhoid pneumonia, the same that had prevailed in the older States.
This singularly fatal disease was followed by a "bilious fever,
characterized, like the plague, by a tendency to local affections.
Abscesses formed among the muscles of the body, legs, and arms, and were
so intractable that limbs were sometimes amputated to get rid of the
evil." Recalling the use he had seen made of the bandage, while abroad,
in the treatment of ulcers of the leg, Dudley applied this device to the
burrowing abscesses he saw so frequently in the subjects of the fever.
The true position and exceeding value of the roller bandage were not so
generally recognized then as now. Dr. Dudley was no doubt himself
surprised at the success which followed the practice. This success
probably led him to urge that wide application of the bandage with which
his name came in time to be so generally associated.

The tide of practice now set full toward him. He had come home a
thorough anatomist. With opportunity he exhibited surpassing skill in
the use of the knife. His reputation soon became national.

No medical school had at that time been founded west of the Alleghanies.
The need of such an institution was felt on every hand. Transylvania
Universi