Science and Medicine

He served as physician to St. Philip’s Parish hospital (part of the city’s poorhouse) and as a quarantine officer for the province. He was also president of the Faculty of Physic, a body established in May 1755 to advance the professional standing, interests, and income of Charleston’s medical men.

Moultrie’s political life began when the governor appointed him a justice of the peace in 1756. During the French and Indian War, he joined the militia and rose to the rank of major.

Mullis’s impact on the world of biotechnology has been described as no less than revolutionary. While employed at the Cetus Corporation in Emeryville, California, he conceived and developed the idea of PCR, polymerase chain reaction, in 1983.

Set in the South Carolina environment she grew up in, Nelson’s writing typically recounts what life was like for ordinary African Americans of her community.

Seven nuclear reactors, with a combined capacity of 6,525 MW, were in operation in South Carolina by 1986; the first one was generating electricity in 1970. By the start of the twenty-first century, more than half (52.2 percent) of the electricity generated in the state was created by nuclear fission, as compared to about 20 percent for the United States as a whole.

Numerous scientific papers, popular magazine articles, books, and even a song have been dedicated to this plant. Today the Oconee bell is considered a rare plant.

An avid reader of detective stories, Ottolengui was a pioneer in forensic dentistry and authored at least five mystery novels.

Unable to join the racially segregated American Medical Association, five South Carolina physicians organized the Palmetto State Medical Association in 1896 as a vehicle to improve health care for African Americans and to graduate more medically trained professionals.

South Carolinians became great patent-medicine users after the war, but the market was dominated by northern-produced goods. A Columbia editor complained in 1866 that the southern press sold cut-rate advertising to Yankee “patent blood-suckers.”

The threat that pellagra once posed in the South is now largely and happily forgotten. But in the first three decades of the twentieth century it was on many southerners’ minds.

In November 1862 Pember was approached by Mrs. George W. Randolph, wife of the Confederate secretary of war. She asked Pember to serve as matron in Chimborazo Hospital, a complex of military hospitals on the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia.

Pickens remained a small town throughout the twentieth century, although improvements continued. In 1947 Dr. Gaine E. Cannon began Cannon Memorial Hospital as a clinic, which expanded to a forty-seven-bed hospital in 1949 and moved to new facilities in 1982.

A slaveowner and supporter of secession, Porcher volunteered as a surgeon for the Confederate army in 1861, serving first in an army hospital in Norfolk, Virginia, and later in Petersburg, Virginia.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Pratt organized the “Jordan Grays” and was mustered into service of the state of Georgia in November 1861.

Despite the history of neglect, South Carolina’s public health history contains its share of heroic practitioners and public-spirited health officers who fought against great odds to improve the health of their communities.

In 1789 Ramsay was among the founders of the Medical Society of South Carolina, and he was elected its president in 1797.

After helping to establish the Medical College of South Carolina in 1824, Ravenel served as its professor of chemistry and pharmacy and, later, as dean.

At Northampton, Ravenel developed his interest in collecting, identifying, and pressing/preserving plants, which included all levels of plants from fungi to flowering plants.

Investigating the marl deposits along the Cooper River, Ravenel ascertained that the marl could be converted into lime. In 1856 he secured a patent to use carbonate of lime for the production of artificial stone, and a year later he established the first stone lime works in the state at Stony Landing, which would go on to supply most of the lime used by the Confederacy.

In 1903 Rea became professor of biology and geology and curator of the museum at the College of Charleston. He would remain at the college until 1914. He assumed his position as curator of the museum at a time when it needed a leader with vision and a commitment to increasing the educational and research potentials of the collections.