memory for the facts." The critics from far and near fell upon him. The
profession at home cast doubt upon the narrative. The profession abroad
ridiculed it. For all that, McDowell kept his temper and his course, and
when he finally laid down his knife he had a score of thirteen
operations done for diseased ovaria, with eight recoveries, four deaths,
and one failure to complete the operation because of adhesions.

It would be neither fitting nor becoming on this occasion, and in this
presence, to speak in detail of the technic observed by McDowell in his
work. That has long since passed into history. I may, however, be
permitted the remark that the procedure, in many of its features, is
necessarily that of to-day. The incision was longer than that now
usually made, and the ends of the pedicle ligature were left hanging
from the lower angle of the wound. But the pedicle itself was dropped
back into the abdomen. The patient was turned on her side to allow the
blood and other fluids to drain away. The wound was closed with
interrupted sutures. This marvel of work was done without the help of
anesthetics or trained assistants, or the many improved instruments of
to-day, which have done so much to simplify and make the operation easy.
McDowell had never heard of antisepsis, nor dreamed of germicides or
germs; but water, distilled from nature's unpolluted cisterns by the
sun, and dropped from heaven's condensers in the clean blue sky, with
air winnowed through the leaves of the primeval forest which deepened
into a wilderness about him on every hand, gave him and his patients
aseptic facility and environment which the most favored living
laparotomist well might envy. These served him well, and six out of
seven of his first cases recovered. He removed the first tumor in
twenty-five minutes, a time not since much shortened by the average
operator.

It was not alone, however, in this hitherto unexplored field of surgery
that McDowell showed himself a master. His skill was exhibited equally
in other capital operations. He acquired at an early day distinction as
a lithotomist, which brought to him patients from other States. He
operated by the lateral method, and for many years used the gorget in
opening the bladder. At a later period he employed the scalpel
throughout. He performed lithotomy thirty-two times without a death.
Among those who came to him to be cut for stone was a pale, slender boy,
who had traveled all the way fro