Dr. Ephraim McDowell, a pioneer in abdominal surgery, examines his patient and makes the decision to attempt the first surgical removal of an ovarian tumor, earning him the sobriquet Father of Ovariotomy.
The forty-five-year-old patient, Jane Todd Crawford, had been misdiagnosed as being pregnant with twins. McDowell, who ran a surgical practice in Danville, Kentucky, had briefly studied medicine with the world-renowned medical faculty of Scotland’s University of Edinburgh. He offered a different diagnosis: a large ovarian tumor. He decided to risk the previously untried surgery and set Christmas Day for the operation.
A reader today can only imagine Crawford’s agony. McDowell, working without anesthetics (see here) or antibiotics (see here), which were then unavailable, removed a twenty-two-pound benign tumor. Crawford’s suffering was rewarded, however: she made a complete recovery and lived until the ripe old age of seventy-eight.
McDowell’s account of the operation, published in 1817, created a sensation in the medical world. He went on to perform eight more ovariotomies. (In 1951, under more modern conditions, Chicago surgeons removed a three-hundred-pound ovarian cyst from a fifty-eight-year-old in a four-day surgery.) Another notch in McDowell’s distinguished medical bedpost occurred when he operated on future U.S. president James Polk, then a member of the Tennessee legislature. McDowell removed a gallstone and repaired a hernia.
Ironically, McDowell the abdominal expert died of a burst appendix in 1830. He was fifty-eight. Kentucky has honored his medical and surgical achievements with one of its two allotted statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol complex. The other is of a rather more famous historic Kentuckian: Henry Clay.—TL