Abernethy One of NC's First Modern Doctors

The North Carolina Medical School (originally the old Presbyterian Hospital) as it appeared in Charlotte near the turn of the twentieth century.
The North Carolina Medical College as it made its first appearance on the campus of Davidson College in Davidson in the 1890s.

After World War I when returning American soldiers suffered the plague of the "Spanish" flu (as it was then called), Dr. Miles Burwell Abernethy of Reidsville, NC, was put on the U.S. Department of Health's list of physicans approved to minister on troop ships in New York harbor and elsewhere. Only doctors trained in modern medical practice were so honored. He was called to duty in New York.

Miles Burwell Abernethy first took premed courses at Davidson College under the tutelage of Dr. J.P Munroe, who advertised those classes as early as 1896, when "Burwell" (as he was called) was a farm boy of 15. Probably Dr. Munroe recruited him as an undergraduate while he was still a promising day student, living on a farm (property now under Lake Norman) in Cornelius.

After the clinical section of the Medical College moved its upper classes to Charlotte in 1902, Dr. Abernethy must have moved with it and been among its first students, as he graduated around 1905. Family descendents know why the move to Charlotte was significant for him: while he was a student in the building on West Trade Street, he met a young woman then studying music at Charlotte Female Seminary (aka Queens College) who was to become his wife in 1907.

The Medical College existed in Charlotte for a scant 11 years, but that was time enough for Dr. Abernethy to see Edna Whisnant not far from her home near the College wheeling Isaac Marshall, her much younger brother (born in 1901 when Edna was 16), in a baby carriage . He enquired after the baby's health, not knowing she wasn't the mother. And then. . .

Memorial Day in the South: Beaufort

It began as a memorial to the Union dead called Decoration Day, so those from outside the South should not be surprised that only in recent years has Memorial Day been celebrated in South Carolina with any enthusiasm. After all, there still exists Confederate Memorial Day, which in South Carolina comes about 10 days earlier (May 10) and commemorates the death of Stonewall Jackson.

We can point to World War I as the war that brought North and South together on this point. According to one source, "By 1890 [Memorial Day] was recognized by all of the northern states. The South refused to acknowledge the day, honoring their dead on separate days until after World War I (when the holiday changed from honoring just those who died fighting in the Civil War to honoring Americans who died fighting in any war)."

With some irony I note that my parents are buried in Beaufort National Cemetery, one of the most beautiful of these honored spots. Irony because my mother's ancestors fought for the South, and the cemetery boasts large memorials to the Union fighters. Appropriate because my father fought with the Marines at Iwo Jima and in other Pacific battles, and their grave is located at the edge of rows of Ohio troops from the Civil War.

Not long before the first celebration of Union dead in the North, Henry Timrod of Charleston wrote an "Ode on the Confederate Dead" for a day of decorating the graves of the Confederate soldiers buried in Magnolia Cemetery on the Charleston Neck. One line sticks in my mind: "Sleep sweetly in your humble graves."