Biographical sketch of Dr. Ephraim McDowell / by John D. Jackson.

  • John Davies Jackson
Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Biographical sketch of Dr. Ephraim McDowell / by John D. Jackson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Indeed, until the critical investigations of Dr. Gross, it was generally believed that L’Aumonier, Dzondi, and Galenzow^ski had all preceded him, by having each done at least a single ovariotomy. Going to the original records of these gentlemen, however, it was found that the first had only punctured an ab- scess of the ovary, that Dzondi’s was simply a case of gastrot- omy upon a boy for a pelvic tumor, and Galenzowski's case, while really an imperfect ovariotomy, was not done until 1827, eighteen years after the first case of McDowell. When Dr. Ephraim McDowell performed his first operation, as he said in publication of it, he had never “ heard of an attempt or suc- cess attending any operation such as this required.” At pres- ent we are not aware that even the most persevering antiqua- rian research has been able to find an undoubted ovariotomy before the time of McDowell; for although we observe that Mr. Spencer Wells, in his recently published history of the origin and progress of ovariotomy, says, on the authority of Dr. Washington L. Atlee, that Dr. Robert Houstoun operated near Glasgow in 1701, and that “from this case it will appear that ovariotomy originated with British surgery, on British ground,” yet a reference to the original record shows very plainly that Dr. Houstoun was never really an ovariotomist, in the sense of his having removed an ovary, his operation, like L’Aumonier s, consisting in laying open the diseased ovary and evacuating a large quantity of gelatinous fluid, when, as he says, “I squeezed out all I could and stitched up the wound in three places almost equi-distant.” We observe that Dr. Atlee, in his volume on “ Ovarian Tumors,” dedicates the book to his brother. Dr. John L. Atlee, and to the memory of “ Dr. Ephraim McDow- ell, the Father of Ovariotomy.” Even had the operation been done many times before, forgotten or unnoticed, as the cases lay among the dead records of the past, it should not and would not derogate at all from the glory of Dr. McDowell, who had never heard even of any attempt to perform it, and wRo, after his performance of it, first succeeded in establishing it as a legitimate operation in the medical world. When we think of one living on the border of Western civilization, in a little town
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