The pioneer heroine of abdominal surgery is buried on SR 63 about a mile north of Graysville. In December 1809, Jane Todd Crawford made the sixty-mile ride to Danville, Kentucky, where Dr. Ephraim McDowell removed a huge abdominal tumor in the first ovariotomy ever performed: twenty-five minutes, no anesthesia, and a complete recovery. She lived her last years in Graysville with her son Thomas and died in 1842 at seventy-eight. Stop at Johnson Cemetery and pay her a visit; the 1972 marker at her grave was the county’s first.
