of an old and wealthy Catholic family of Maryland. He
was born in February, 1776. His father journeyed to Kentucky eight
years later, and cleared a farm near Shepherdsville, in Bullitt County.
Walter was his seventh son, and was therefore set apart for the medical
profession.

When a youth he was enrolled in the literary department of Transylvania
University, where it is said he ranked high as a scholar in Latin. At
the age of twenty he began the study of medicine, in Lexington, with Dr.
Frederick Ridgely, a very cultivated physician and popular man, who had
won distinction in the medical staff of the Continental Army. After two
years spent in this way, he rode on horseback to Philadelphia, and
attended upon a course of lectures in the University of Pennsylvania. At
this time Rush, Barton, and Physick were teachers in that venerable seat
of learning. His was a restless nature, and after a year spent in
Philadelphia he shipped to China as surgeon of a vessel. While among the
Celestials he amputated a woman's breast, probably the first exploit of
the kind by one from the antipodes. Unfortunately for science, he there
learned the method used by the Chinese for clarifying ginseng, and
thinking, on his return home, that he saw in this an easy way to wealth,
he abandoned the profession in which he had exhibited such originality,
judgment, and skill, and engaged in merchandising. Twelve years of
commerce and its hazards left him a bankrupt in fortune, but brought
him back to the calling in which he was so well fitted to shine. He
moved, in 1813, from Bardstown to Lexington, where he at once secured a
large practice, especially in diseases of the bones and joints. He was
thought to excel in the treatment of fractures of the skull, for the
better management of which a trephine was made in Philadelphia, under
his direction, which, in his judgment, was superior to any then in use.

The same temper which led him to leave Philadelphia without his medical
degree, sail to China, and afterward enter commerce, again asserted
itself, and he forsook for the second time his vocation. With his family
he now moved to St. Mary's Parish, Louisiana, and engaged in
sugar-planting. During his residence in the South he served his adopted
State in the Senate of the United States. He employed much time in the
study of the flora of the West. "During the winter of 1843-4, when Henry
Clay was on a visit to New Orleans" (says a writer in the New Orleans