Abstract
I occasionally carry out the interesting exercise of asking a group of my medical students if they can guess the date of the first successful elective laparotomy, the name of the surgeon who performed the procedure and where it took place. After a long and profound silence, someone might suggest ‘around 1870 or 1880’, guess at some well-known name, such as Joseph Lister (who, in fact, never performed a laparotomy), and opine that the venue must have been one of the great British teaching hospitals or a famous continental clinic. None of these could be further from the truth – the place was Danville, Kentucky, the surgeon Ephraim McDowell and the date 1809 – just 200 years ago.
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