Joseph Nash McDowell (1805-1868) was one of the most influential and respected doctors west of the Mississippi in the 1840s until his death in 1868. He is primarily remembered for his grave-digging practices, where he illegally exhumed corpses in order to study human anatomy. He is also known for his influence on Mark Twain, and was likely the inspiration for Twain's fictional character Dr. Robinson in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer."
Early career
Dr. McDowell moved to St. Louis in 1839 with a reputation that preceded him. He had previously worked in Kentucky, Philadelphia and Ohio at various medical facilities, and studied at Transylvania University in Kentucky. After McDowell's death, it became affiliated with the Washington University School of Medicine in 1899.
Collecting Corpses
In the 1840s, using cadavers to study human anatomy was a highly uncommon, and frowned upon, practice in the United States. Prior to the Civil War, only 5 states allowed the dissection of non-felons for medical and educational purposes. Three of these laws were soon repealed, leaving the practice legal in only New York and Massachusetts. Dissecting cadavers was crucial to gain a comprehensive understanding of human anatomy and to enhance and develop more accurate medical practices; however, the public was wary of the idea, believing it to be a desecration of the dead. In large part, this feeling was due to religious reasons; Christianity, for example, calls for burial of the dead. Exhuming the dead was not only disrespectful but could also be considered sacrilegious; it was believed a body needed to be intact to enter Heaven.
Dr. McDowell believed the practice to be necessary in order to advance medicine and his own personal understanding of the human body. During his time teaching at the medical school, he not only encouraged but also required that his students perform at least one human dissection before their graduation. This illegal practice served as a form of bonding for the students; with the practice being strictly taboo to most of society they had only each other with which to discuss what they had done and how it impacted their education.
Rumors and Folklore
There had been 'anatomy riots' across America in the 1840s: a public, outraged by allegations of body-snatching, angrily targeted medical schools. One of the largest demonstrations had been in St. Louis after locals had found discarded remains of several dissected cadavers in an open pit behind St. Louis University. Five years later in 1849, a mob stormed Dr. McDowell’s Missouri Medical College, after the family of a girl whom McDowell had previously attended suspected him of later stealing her corpse from its grave. They were correct: McDowell had been determined to learn more of what caused her death, but upon receiving a tip-off note warning of the raid, he successfully hid the body, guided (he claimed) by a vision of his dead mother While never actually caught in the act, it was common knowledge in St. Louis that McDowell and his medical students were exhuming the recently dead in order to dissect the bodies. Rumors spread and he later became known as "Mad Doctor McDowell."