The overall goal of the third year medical student core rotation in surgery is to provide, to students, the knowledge of surgery necessary to the practicing primary care physician.

Course Overview

Specific learning objectives

Small group Discussion Topics (Fundamentals of Clinical Medicine Course Topics)

Mid Course Evaluation Form

Recommended Textbooks

The Dawn of Adominal Surgery
by Dean Cormel

In 1809, Dr. Ephraim McDowell was called to Green County, Kentucky, to see a patient, Mrs. Jane Crawford. Mrs. Crawford thought she was expecting twins. Upon examination, Dr. McDowell realized she had an ovarian tumor. After consultation with Mrs. Crawford, Dr. McDowell told her if she would travel to his home in Danville, he would perform the experimental surgery. Dr. McDowell returned home. Mrs. Crawford followed a few days later, sixty miles on horseback. She rested several days after her arrival.

Then on Christmas morning, 1809, Dr. McDowell began his historic operation. The ovarian tumor he removed from Mrs. Crawford weighed twenty-two and one-half pounds. The surgery was performed without benefit of anesthetic or antisepsis, neither of which was known to the medical profession at the time. Mrs. Crawford's surgery was successful. She returned to her home in Green County twenty-five days after the operation and lived another thirty-two years. This was the first successful removal of an ovarian tumor in the world.

Dr. McDowell continued his medical practice until his death from cramp colic in June 1830, at the age of fifty-eight. Medical authorities today believe it was a ruptured appendix.