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Ephraim McDowell was born on November 11, 1771, in Rockbridge County, Virginia. He was the son of Samuel and Mary (McClung) McDowell. He was the ninth of eleven children. His father, a veteran of the French and Indian War and a colonel in the Revolution, went to Kentucky in 1784, taking his family with him. He was a prominent man in the history of Kentucky, where he presided over the first organized court and also over the convention which framed the constitution of the state.
The family settled in Danville, and Ephraim received his premedical education at the seminary of Worley and James, located first at Georgetown and afterward at Bardstown. Soon after leaving that school he went to Staunton, Virginia, and entered the office of Dr. Alexander Humphreys as a medical student. In 1793-94, he attended lectures at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh, where his preceptor had graduated, and at the same time took a course with John Bell, a brilliant private teacher. He returned to America in 1795 without having secured a degree, but with a broadened understanding of the medicine of that day and particularly of anatomy and surgery.
McDowell settled in Danville, and established a reputation as the best surgeon west of Philadelphia. McDowell was not a writer and did not even keep notes on his cases. He published but two papers, in an obscure journal, which together described inadequately the first five cases upon which he performed ovariotomy. Recognition of his work was consequently slow in coming, and his reports attracted practically no attention until one contained in a letter addressed to John Bell of Edinburgh, but never received by him, was published by John Lizars in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal for October 1824, seven years after it was written. A similar report sent to Philip Syng Physick in Philadelphia was never acknowledged, if received, and never published. Nevertheless McDowell was doing bold surgery. In a letter dated January 2, 1829, to Robert Thompson, a student of medicine in Philadelphia, he described vividly the circumstances under which he performed his first operation for diseased ovaria. "I was sent for in 1809, " he wrote, "to deliver a Mrs. Crawford near Greentown of twins; as the two attending physicians supposed. Upon examination per vaginam I soon ascertained that she was not pregnant; but had a large tumor in the Abdomen which moved easily from side to side. I told the Lady I could do her no good and candidly stated to her her deplorable situation; Informed her that John Bell Hunter Hey and A Wood four of the first and most eminent Surgeons in England and Scotland had uniformly declared in their Lectures that such was the danger of Peritoneal Inflammation, that opening the abdomen to extract the tumour was inevitable death.
But notwithstanding this, if she thought herself prepared to die, I would take the lump from her if she could come to Danville; She came in a few days after my return home and in six days I opened her side and extracted one of the ovaria which from its diseased and enlarged state weighed upwards of twenty pounds; The Intestines, as soon as an opening was made ran out upon the table remained out about thirty minutes and, being upon Christmas day they became so cold that I thought proper to bathe them in tepid water previous to my replacing them; I then returned them stitched up the wound and she was perfectly well in twenty-five days. " At the date of this writing McDowell had performed ovariotomy twelve times, with but one death, and he had repeatedly performed radical operative cures for non-strangulated hernia. This last fact was unknown to Samuel D. Gross, whose excellent sketches of McDowell are the most reliable and accurate to be found. Gross states that McDowell performed at least thirty-two operations for stone in the bladder, without a death. He used the lateral perineal incision. One patient upon whom he successfully operated for both stone and hernia was James K. Polk, afterwards president of the United States.
In June 1830, he was seized with an acute attack of illness marked by violent pain and nausea at the outset, then fever; and his death occurred on June 25. His disease at the time was referred to as inflammatory fever, but it is an interesting speculation, and not improbable, that the founder of abdominal surgery died of appendicitis.
On December 25, 1809, he performed the world's first ovariotomy when he removed a cystic ovarian tumor weighing more than twenty pounds from Jane Todd Crawford. He performed the same proceedure eleven other times with the loss of only one patient. He also was a founder of Centre College in Danville and a member of the board of trustees of that institution from 1819-1829. In 1879, a monument in his honor was erected by the Medical Society of Kentucky in Danville. In 1929, Isaac Wolfe Bernheim donated a bronze statue of McDowell by Charles Henry Niehaus to the state of Kentucky for placement in the U. S. Capitol's National Statuary Hall Collection. The statue depicts the ovarian tumor that McDowell removed from Jane Crawford, sitting in a bowl on the table behind McDowell. An identical statue by the same artist stands in the rotunda of the Kentucky State Capitol in Frankfort, Kentucky. In 1959, on December 30, the U. S. Post office first issued a 4-cent commemorative stamp honoring McDowell, in the Danville, Kentucky, post office, marking the 150th anniversary of the first successful ovarian operation. McDowell's house, office, and apothecary in Danville are preserved as a museum and are designated a National Historic Landmark. Ephraim McDowell Regional Medical Center in Danville is named in his honor.
( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
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(This book an EXACT reproduction of the original book publ...)
McDowell was a religious man, and assigned as a reason for his preference for operating on Sundays his desire for the prayers of the congregation. He helped to found and gave the ground for the Episcopal Church in Danville, and was one of the founders and first trustees of Centre College.
It is to his credit that he cautioned his students against too free a use of medicines and gave it as his opinion that the employment of medical drugs was more of a curse than a blessing to the human race.
McDowell was a large man, vigorous and athletic, as he needed to be to withstand the hardships of the long journeys he took on horseback. He did much professional work for charity, but from those who could pay them he demanded fees large for that day.
In 1802, McDowell married Sarah Shelby, daughter of Gov. Isaac Shelby. Six children were born to this union. McDowell is said to have had an excellent library; he was always a student and, with the young men studying in his office, carried on dissections during each winter.
7 November 1735 - 25 September 1817
28 May 1734 - 27 October 1827
8 December 1757 - 17 July 1835
13 September 1768 - 22 June 1856
8 March 1764 - 20 June 1831
29 April 1760 - 31 December 1843
1777 - 1811
26 June 1766 - 6 July 1835
8 October 1785 - 17 October 1846
12 August 1819 - 3 May 1827
8 November 1814 - 1 February 1904
23 December 1803 - 13 January 1834
30 January 1817 - 24 April 1891
26 October 1827 - 10 October 1829
23 October 1825 - 16 August 1827
4 July 1805 - 24 May 1824
