McDowell, John J. (b. 1834?), a native of Kentucky and a physician, was the son of Joseph Nash McDowell (1805–68), a brilliant, but eccentric, surgeon who in 1840 helped to found the first medical college in St. Louis. (A discussion of the father can be found in Wecter 1952, 160–61, where, however, he is confused with his uncle, Ephraim D. McDowell, “the originator of ovariotomy.”) John McDowell started living with Clemens’s aunt and uncle, Ella and James Andrew Hays Lampton, by the summer of 1860, and Clemens comments in “Villagers” (98) on the “arrant scandal” of McDowell’s affair with Ella. In 1870 McDowell described his relationship with the Lamptons in more innocent terms: “When I was a youth, I determined to leave home to find some one who would be kind to me. My mother was dead, and my father . . . had a second time entered the marriage relation. My stepmother and I could not agree. Mr. and Mrs. Lampton met me, took me to their home and were so kind to me that I never left them. I have felt as one of the family ever since that day” (Keith, 10; St. Louis Census 1850, 415:258; St. Louis Census 1860, 656:637; Scharf, 2:1526–27; Varble, 252–53).
