Notable surgeon at Transylvania taught a generation of future American doctors
Editor’s Note: As Lexington celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, the Herald-Leader and kentucky.com each day throughout 2025 will share interesting facts about our hometown. Compiled by Liz Carey, all are notable moments in the city’s history - some funny, some sad, others heartbreaking or celebratory, and some just downright strange.
Jan. 20, 1870: Benjamin Winslow Dudley, one of the area’s first doctor/teachers, dies.
Dudley was a surgeon who also served as a professor of medicine at Transylvania University for more than 30 years. Born in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, in 1785, Dudley and his family moved to Bryan Station, Kentucky, in 1786, when he was just 1.
By 1797, the family had moved to Lexington. He attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and graduated in 1806.
For a while, he took a break from his studies to work on a flatboat on the Mississippi River. With the money he earned buying and selling flour to Europeans, he traveled to London to continue his studies and to join the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
He moved back to Lexington in 1816, and was named Transylvania University’s chair of the Department of Anatomy and Surgery in 1817.
Dudley was known for his surgeries to treat gallstones, and for a procedure known as a trephination where a surgeon drills a hole into a patient’s head to cure epilepsy.
Dudley trained hundreds of surgeons, many of whom would go on to treat Confederate Army soldiers and veterans. In his teachings, he stressed the importance of cleanliness and attributed his surgical success to the “clean, rural Kentucky air.”
Dudley and his wife, Anna Marie Short, raised their daughter and two sons at Fairlawn mansion off what is now North Broadway until his death in 1870.
This story was originally published January 25, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
