Missouri’s Mad Doctor McDowell: Confederates, Cadavers and Macabre Medicine

Body snatcher. Grave robber. Mad scientist. Brilliant surgeon. Delve into the macabre world of St. Louis s Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, a man so loathed by the public that he wore body armor and so idolized by his anatomy students that they dug up corpses for his experiments. This ghoulish doctor cast a pall over the city and left a host of fiendish mysteries. Did his mother s ghost actually help him escape an angry mob? Did he really hang the corpse of his daughter in Hannibal s Mark Twain Cave? What very real horrors remained in his medical college after loyal Unionists drove him out? Dissect a life surrounded by speculation and a legend littered with ghosts.