Ephraim McDowell

Ephraim McDowell was an American physician and surgeon who practiced in Danville, Kentucky, where he cofounded Centre College, and who is remembered as the father of ovariotomy. On Christmas morning 1809, working without anesthesia or antiseptic knowledge, he removed a 22.5-pound ovarian tumor from a patient named Jane Todd Crawford in an operation lasting about 25 minutes; Crawford recovered fully and lived another 32 years, and the operation is regarded as a founding achievement of abdominal surgery. McDowell also refined the technique for lithotomy, the surgical removal of bladder stones, and his patients included a young James K. Polk, the future president of the United States.