Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/965

NAME PRIME 943 PRINCE when a boy and was associated in his work with his brother, Dr. Joseph Price (q. v.); He died suddenly at his home in Philadel- phia from apoplexy, October 29, 1904, aged sixty. Amer. Med., Pliila., 1904, vol. viii. Buffalo Med. .Tour., 1904, n. s., vol. xliv. Jour. Am. Med. Asso., Chicago, 1904, vol. .xliii. New York Med. Jour., 1904, vol. Ixxx. Prime, Benjamin Young (1733-1791) Benjamin Young Prime was born in Hun- tington, Long Island, December 20, 1733, and died in his native town, October 31, 1791. A brief account of the Prime family history seems pertinent in order better to understand the personal history and the prominent events in his life. Dr. Benjamin Y. Prime was the son of Ebenezer Prime, a clergyman, who was born in Milford. Connecticut, July 21, 1700, and died in Huntington, Long Island, September 25, 1779. Dr. Prime's father gradu- ated at Yale in 1718 and later studied for the ministry and settled in Huntington, L. I., and on June 5 was ordained pastor of the village church, where he preached until his death. During the Revolutionary war, Eben- ezer Prime's church was converted into a military station by the British and the house was taken from him and his books were burned. He was turned out of his home in his seventy-seventh year on account of patri- otic affiliations, and toward the close of the Revolutionary war the village was occupied by the British soldiers and a British officer ordered the church to be torn down and the material utilized ,for building barracks in the graveyard. The officer ordered his own tent pitched over the grave of Ebenezer that he might have the satisfaction of "treading on the d old rebel's body" as he went in and out of his tent. Benjamin Young Prime, Ebenezer's son, was a graduate of Princeton College in 1751, and later studied medicine under Dr. Jacob Ogden, and began to practise in Easthampton, L. I. In 1756-57 he held the position of tutor in Princeton College. He was a great linguist and after his death there were found among his private papers a Latin versification of one of the Psalms written in all the various metres of the odes of Horace. In 1762 he sailed for England to attend the medical clinics, and later graduated at the University of Leyden in July, 1774. He then went to Russia and subsequently returned to New York and practised medicine there. He wrote a poem on the passage of the stamp act, entitled "A Song for the Sons of Liberty." At the beginning of the Revolutionary war he left New York and returned to Huntington, L. I., from which place he was obliged to flee to Connecticut, owing to his political views. At the close of the war he returned to his native town. After the war he wrote ballads and songs, among which may be men- tioned: "The Patriot Muse," London, 1764 (poems on some of the principal events of the Revolutionary war); "Columbia's Glory: a poem on the American Revolution," 1791 ; and "Muscipula Cambryomachia," 1838. He wrote essays in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French and Spanish. He contributed nothing to med- ical literature that can be found. He was the father of Nathaniel Scuddcr Young Prime, a clergyman ; Samuel Irenaeus Prime, eminent editor; Edward Dorr Griffin Prime, a clergyman ; and William Cowper Prime, a journalist. Frederic S. Dennis. Appleton's Cyclop. Amer. Biog., N. Y.. 1888. A Critical Dictionarv of Eng. Literature, S. Austin Allibone, Phila., 1908. Prince, David (1816-1896) David Prince, of Jacksonville, Illinois, was a surgeon, a professor of surgery and a writer, having no less than forty-one titles in the catalogue of the Surgeon-General's office. His best-known work was a treatise on plastic and orthopedic surgery that was used as a text- book in the medical colleges of the middle west. He was born in Brooklyn, Connecticut, June 21, 1816. His parents moving to Canandaigua, New York, he was educated at the academy in that town and then went to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, for the western dis- trict at Fairfield, New York State, finally taking his M. D. at the Medical College of Ohio, Cincinnati (1839), where he was brought into contact with Reuben Dimond Mussey (q. v.). After assisting Mussey for a year and a half. Dr. Prince settled in Payson, Illinois, his father having moved there. In 1843 he went to Jacksonville, Illinois, and was professor of anatomy in the Illinois Med- ical College for the five succeeding years, when this institution went out of existence ; then for three years he practised in St. Louis, Mo., and lectured on surgery at the St. Louis Medical College, finally reaching his perma- nent residence in Jacksonville in 1852. During the Civil War he was a surgeon of volunteers ; after the contest he established a sanatorium where he did much surgery; twice he visited Europe, both times as a delegate to interna- tional congresses. He was one of the first in Illinois to use ether as an anesthetic and also to perform ovariotomy (December 25, 1847).