Ephraim McDowell, who will perform the first…
December 1809 CE
His father was a veteran of the French and Indian War and a colonel during the American Revolution.
In 1784 Samuel McDowell had been appointed land commissioner and moved his family to Danville, Kentucky, where he had presided over ten conventions that resulted in the drafting of the Kentucky Constitution.
Ephraim McDowell had received his early education at the classical seminary of Worley and James, then spent three years as a medical student under Dr. Alexander Humphreys in Staunton, Virginia.
He had attended lectures in medicine at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, from 1793 to 1794 and studied privately with John Bell.
He never received a diploma, but in 1825, the University of Maryland will confer on him an honorary M.D. degree.
In 1795, McDowell had returned from Scotland, settled in Danville, Kentucky and begun his practice as a surgeon.
McDowell has perfected the modern surgical technique of lithotomy, for removal of stones obstructing the urinary bladder. (One of his most famous patients is James K. Polk, for whom he will remove a urinary stone and repaired a hernia.)
On December 13, 1809, McDowell is called to see Jane Todd Crawford in Green County, Kentucky, sixty miles (ninety-seven kilometers) from Danville.
Her physicians think that Mrs. Crawford is beyond term pregnant.
McDowell diagnoses an ovarian tumor.
Crawford begs him to keep her from a slow and painful death.
He then describes her condition and that an operation for cure has never been performed.
He says that the best surgeons in the world think it impossible.
Crawford says she understands and wants to proceed.
McDowell tells her he will remove the tumor if she will travel to his home in Danville.
She agrees and rides the sixty miles on horseback.
On Christmas morning, 1809, McDowell begins his operation.
The surgery is performed without benefit of anesthetic or antisepsis, neither of which is then known to the medical profession.
The tumor McDowell removes weighed twenty-two and a half pounds pounds (ten point two kilograms).
He had determined that it would be difficult to remove completely, so he tied a ligature around the fallopian tube near the uterus and cut open the tumor.
He describes the tumor as the ovarium and fimbrious part of the fallopian tube very much enlarged.
The whole procedure takes twenty-five minutes.
Crawford will make an uncomplicated recovery, returning to her home in Green County twenty-five days after the operation; she will live another thirty-two years.
This is the first successful removal of an ovarian tumor in the world.
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Northern North America
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