Samuel Polk and his son ride 250 miles on horseback from their Tennessee plantation to the office of Kentucky surgeon Ephraim McDowell. The Edinburgh-trained doctor is at the forefront of the new field of abdominal medicine. McDowell will later write that he found the teenager to be “uncouth and uneducated, a meager boy with pallid cheeks, oppressed and worn down with disease.” After a consultation, seventeen-year-old James is led into an operating theater.
