Departures of note

Joseph Nash McDowell, a St. Louis physician and founder of the Missouri Medical College, became notorious in the 1840s for exhuming corpses to study human anatomy. He required his students to perform at least one dissection before graduation, a practice illegal in most states and widely condemned as sacrilege. In 1849, a mob stormed his college after the family of a former patient suspected him of stealing her body. McDowell had indeed taken the corpse, but he hid it successfully, later claiming he was guided by a vision of his dead mother. He was never caught in the act, yet rumors earned him the nickname 'Mad Doctor McDowell.'

That same year, suspicion fell on him again after the disappearance of Mrs. Malter, a prominent German-American businessman's wife, last seen near the college. Hundreds of angry locals, led by German immigrants, gathered outside the school demanding a search. McDowell prepared for a violent standoff, keeping '3 cannons and 1,400 muskets' and 30 armed students on the premises. The police intervened, and McDowell allowed Mrs. Malter's husband to search the building on condition the mob disperse. No evidence was found; two months later, Mrs. Malter was discovered alive in Alton, Missouri, with a 'handsomer man,' and appeared 'mentally unstable.'

McDowell's unconventional practices extended to his own family. After his daughter Amanda died, he placed her body in a container of preserving alcohol in his cave workspace in Hannibal, Missouri, believing traditional burial 'stifled the soul' and that this method would facilitate communication with the dead. When locals broke into the cave and opened the copper coffin to scare themselves, he had the body moved to a more traditional burial in the family vault behind the Missouri Medical College.

During the Civil War, McDowell served as Surgeon General of the Confederate Army of the West. His medical school was taken over by the Union and became the Gratiot Street Prison, where reports of bones being removed and hauntings circulated. He returned in 1865 to find the school in ruins, and with a colleague began rebuilding it. He died three years later and is buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis. His influence on Mark Twain is noted, with McDowell likely inspiring the character Dr. Robinson in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.