The McDougal Family Tree: A portrait of greatness (Part 1).

McDougal and I are still traveling, so I've turned to a roving McDougal historian to provide historical information on the McDougal clan.

I had meant to continue my travelogue series. However, McDougal is sure that Canadian secret service is attempting to track his movements, so I've been forced to abandon the series.

Please enjoy this little bit of McDougal family history instead.

McDougal's official title, The Great McDougal, is somewhat misleading as it suggests that he is the only member of the McDougal clan to achieve greatness. McDougal has many illustrious ancestors which we here at FOMcD will be profiling over the next few weeks to give you, gentle reader, a better idea of the type of stock McDougal comes from.

In the spring of 1905 Dr. Hauser McDougal became the youngest graduate of Harvard Medical School at an astonishing fourteen years of age. At the age of fifteen he became the youngest person to ever be successfully sued for malpractice. By the age of sixteen he was dead. Hauser's meteoric medical career is now mostly forgotten, mainly because of the efforts of Harvard Medical School to eradicate any evidence that they graduated a fourteen year-old doctor. But careful research will reveal that from September of 1905 to June of 1906 Hauser McDougal was the most sought-after doctor in the entire state of Massachusetts. Patients would line up around the block to receive medical treatment from the "boy doctor." He was particularly revered for the research he conducted involving the use of magnetism in treatments for common maladies. McDougal had many famous clients and is rumored to have even treated President Theodore Roosevelt, fitting him with a pair of magnetic undershorts to treat persistant saddle sores that had been with the President since his days as a Rough Rider.

Unfortunately, along with fame and fortune, the medical profession also gave Hauser McDougal easy access to morphine. He soon found himself hopelessly addicted and his work suffered accordingly. He began treating every complaint, no matter how minor, with the amputation of limbs. The limb to be amputated was selected using a grid painted on the floor of his office. Each square on the grid had the name of a limb painted within. A live goose was then placed on the grid. Whichever square was defecated upon, that limb was removed. Surprisingly, most of the patients treated in this fashion seemed quite happy with the results, and it was not until McDougal's failed attempt to, according to his notes, "amputate the patient's torso away from the rest of the body" that a malpractice lawsuit was filed.

Hauser McDougal lost everything and descended further into madness and addiction, a running theme in any history of the McDougal clan. However, he never gave up his dreams of medical greatness and continued to conduct his medical experiments, mostly on himself and any mongrel dogs not wise enough to give his hovel a wide berth. On February 16, 1907 Hauser McDougal died on his makeshift operating table while attempting to replace his own heart with a large magnet.

The story of Hauser McDougal should have ended there, as a tale of failure and insanity, but this is not the McDougal way. The McDougal family will not allow its greatness to be swept under the rug. Many years later, the result of several shady business deals and possibly one back-alley execution, the life of Dr. Hauser McDougal was adapted into a popular television program about the life of an adolescent doctor coming of age.