Ephraim McDowell, "Father of ovariotomy" : his life and his work / [August Schachner].

  • August Schachner
Date:
[1913?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Ephraim McDowell, "Father of ovariotomy" : his life and his work / [August Schachner]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    [156] These were the only cases that McDowell reported; the exact number of these operations he performed will never be known. Samuel D. Gross collected three additional cases, all white, making eight in all, four in white and four in negro women. Five operations were complete and three were incomplete. Of [157] the five complete operations, there were two in white and three in negro women, with one death among the latter, the mortality of the completed operations thus being 20 per cent. William, his nephew and also at one time a partner, is the authority for the statement that his uncle performed the operation in all 13 times. McDowell’s surgery was not confined to that of the ovary. He performed lithotomy 32 times without a death. One of his lithotomy cases, James K. Polk, later became president of the United States. He operated for hernia and performed all the operations known in his time. After a careful search the writer has been unable to find sufficient evidence to justify the belief that McDowell ever per¬ formed Caesarean section or that he ever returned to Europe after leaving the University of Edinburgh. By preference he operated on Sunday mornings. Considering the importance to humanity of McDowell’s work, he has been overlooked to an unpardonable degree, but what must we say when we come to that brave woman, Jane Todd Crawford, who successfully balanced her heroism against McDowell’s genius and thereby joined with McDowell in emancipating countless millions of human beings of all nations and creeds in time to come, from a terrible condition from which a miserable death alone supplied the avenue of escape. Peaslee in 1870 estimated that McDowell had added 30,000 years to the active life of womanhood in the 30 years prior to 1870 in the United States and Great Britain alone through the operation of ovariotomy. This in itself, would be quite enough to entitle Ephraim McDowell and Jane Todd Crawford to the lasting gratitude of humanity. McDowell’s operations, by demonstrating to the world the feasibility and safety of entering the abdominal cavity, became the cornerstone of abdominal surgery. To estimate even ap¬ proximately at present the thousands of human beings that are
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