[From the history of the ovariotomies. The private hospital in the field of Jelling].

Abstract

The first intraabdominal operation where the patient survived was an ovariotomy performed by Ephraim McDowell Christmas Day 1809. The patient was mrs. Jane Todd Crawford and in her pain and desperation she appeared willing to undergo the operation. After five weeks she was cured and on horseback she went back to Greensburg where she lived. In Great Britain the famous surgeon Spencer Wells was the most important of the pioneers. He performed over twelve hundred ovariotomies. But in Denmark the first nine patients died. Then Julius Boye - a general practitioner and a farmer, but also a selfmade surgeon - published a case in 1867 where the patient survived.. He had performed the operation and many others in a little house in the country far from hospitals. You may say that the house was a Private Hospital When Boye had presented his case the ovariotomy soon became a routine operation like others.