Perhaps no physician who practiced in southeast Missouri in the 19th Century had as varied a career as Dr. Drake McDowell. Drake, or Isaac, McDowell was eldest son of Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell of St. Louis. He was born in Cincinnati in 1831 and came to St. Louis in 1840 with the family. The elder Dr. McDowell established Missouri Medical College in St. Louis and had some eccentric medical ideas. Fearing death during one serious illness, J. N. McDowell directed his interment in a copper coffin suspended in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, but he recovered. The McDowells were strong Confederate sympathizers. When J. N. McDowell fled St. Louis at the onset of the Civil War, authorities seized his college and converted it to Gratiot Prison, a notable site for housing rebel prisoners. J. N. McDowell served as Surgeon General of the Confederate Army of the West.
Drake graduated from the Missouri Medical College, and later served as instructor, Professor of Anatomy and Dean of the Faculty at his alma mater. Colleagues and local newspapers noted McDowell’s talents as both a teacher and a physician. One example from 1856 in St. Louis mentions a man named Wilson with an arm mangled by a Pacific Railroad train. Dr. McDowell performed an amputation deemed as very “…successfully and skillfully performed...”
McDowell married a Miss Provines of Columbia, Missouri in 1854. He opened a practice in Brunswick, Chariton County in 1856, and his first wife died prior to 1859. It was at this time, and craving a change in scenery, that Drake followed those headed to Colorado for the Gold Rush. One account from 1860 states that he convinced city authorities in Denver to appropriate 30 or 40 town lots toward establishment of a hospital and dispensary. He had a large practice in Denver at a time it was growing rapidly.
Dr. McDowell returned to Missouri prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. He and his family were Confederate sympathizers, and he enlisted with the Missouri State Guard in the Bootheel as an Aide de Camp from August to November 1861 at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
Early in the war when Confederates occupied New Madrid, Drake McDowell and a friend visited the home of Mrs. Mildred Lewis for dinner. As they were leaving, Mary LaForge came into the house from the back entrance. Mary ran to the front door and saw Dr. McDowell walking toward the front gate, still wearing a blue uniform he had worn to pass through Union-held territory. “Well,” she said, “I like the looks of the back…I like the way he swaggers…but I don’t like that coat!” The couple met shortly thereafter and married in 1862. Mary’s family was part of the local gentry; her parents being a pioneer couple in New Madrid, Pierre A. Laforge and Harriette Loignon.
McDowell later became the Surgeon for the 8th Missouri Cavalry, otherwise known as Jeffers’ Regiment, and served in that capacity from December 11, 1862, to late 1863.
After the war, Dr. Drake McDowell became Dean of the Faculty at the Missouri Medical College and afterward opened a practice in New Madrid. With the development of Hot Springs, Arkansas as a spa, he moved there in 1875. On March 5, 1878, his office and residence burned in a catastrophic fire in Hot Springs. It was about this time he began to suffer the effects of a gastrointestinal malady that gradually worsened. By the end of 1881, he suffered a stroke and died January 5, 1882.
