On March 28th, 1942, about sixty people gathered at the McDowell lot of the Bellefontaine cemetery to witness the unveiling of a gravestone for Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell. Joseph Nash McDowell (1805-1868) was a mythically talented, paranoid, hot-headed, and racist physician, medical lecturer, grave robber, and Confederate army surgeon general. His legacy, the Missouri Medical College he founded in 1840, was the first medical school west of the Mississippi and “eventually became the nucleus of Washington University School of Medicine” in 1899.
Sources: Schleuter, R. E. (1942). Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell. Washington University Medical Alumni Quarterly, 170-174, Washington University Medical School Becker Library Archives.; Cosner, V. (2015). Missouri's Mad Doctor McDowell. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing; Unveiling of Joseph Nash McDowell's Gravestone. (1942). Weekly Bulletin of the St. Louis Medical Society, 36(28), 29, Washington University Medical School Becker Library Archives.
