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Show .Released by Western Newspaper Union.) Historic Operation "YTRGIN'IA is famous as the "Molher-of -Presidents," as the state which gave America some of her greatest soldiers and explorers as well as statesmen. But on November No-vember 11 this year she can take note of the fact that it was just 140 years ago that she gave to the nation na-tion a man who was destined to make medical history and whose name future generations of suffering Americans were to call blessed. For he was Ephraim McDowell. McDowell was born in Rockbridge county November 11, 1771. At the age of 12 he was taken by his father to the frontier town of Danville in Kentucky. After a brief term in a Virginia seminary young McDowell began the study of medicine in a doctor's office in Staunton. Then he went to Scotland but returned to America after two years study in the University of Edinburgh. In 1795 he returned to Danville to begin practice. Within 10 years McDowell had become the best-known best-known surgeon on the Kentucky frontier fron-tier and whenever one of the settlers set-tlers needed an operation that was beyond the skill of local doctors, word was sent to Danville. Then McDowell hastily crammed his drugs and his instruments into his saddle bags and set out along wilderness wilder-ness trails to the aid of the sufferer. In 1809 he was called upon to make such a call and the operation opera-tion which he performed at that VV1 44 time is the one which made surgical history. The call came from the log cabin of Mrs. Jane Todd Crawford, near Greentown, known today as Greensburg, 60 miles from Danville. In a letter which McDowell wrote to Robert Thompson, a medical student stu-dent in Philadelphia years later, he gave this account of that operation: "I was sent for in 1809 to deliver a Mrs. Crawford, living near Green-town, Green-town, of twins, as the two attending physicians supposed. Upon examination, exami-nation, 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 deplora-ble 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 lec-tures that such was the temper of the peritoneal inflammation that opening the abdomen to extract the tumor was inevitable death. But, notwithstanding this, if she thought herself prepared to die, I would take the lump from her, if she would 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 . . she was perfectly well in 25 days." The doctor's laconic version of the historic incident leaves out all of the drama. For there was drama in it the story of how word that McDowell Mc-Dowell was going to perform an operation op-eration which was almost certain to be fatal spread through the town, how one of the preachers devoted a sermon to the proposed "murder," how his fellow-townsmen threatened to lynch him if the operation failed, and how his nephew and partner, Dr. James McDowell, tried to dis suade him from going on with it. Then there is the story f how he decided to operate on Christmas day when the prayers of all the world would help create a favorable atmosphere at-mosphere for the attempt; how Mrs. Crawford tried to forget the agony of the operation, performed without anesthetics, by singing hymns; how the mob outside the doctor's cabin, hearing her anguished voice, tried to break in the door and stop the operation op-eration and how, finally, when they were told that the operation was successful and the patient still lived, their anger turned to admiration for the heroic doctor and his equally heroic he-roic patient and "the air was riven by a cheer." Mrs. Crawford lived for 33 years after the operation. Later she migrated mi-grated to Indiana and is buried near Graysville. But today in McDowell park in Danville a monument, erected erect-ed by the Kentucky Medical society and its women's auxiliary, stands near the towering shaft which was erected to the memory of her doctor doc-tor by t'ae Kentucky Modical society in 1879. The modern highway, bordered bor-dered with dogwood, between Danville Dan-ville and Greensburg. called the Jane Todd Crawford Memorial Trail, also honors this pioneer heroine. |