William Miller Thorne, Jr.

William Miller Thorne, Jr. was born in Summerville, South Carolina in 1880. He graduated from Mt. Hermon School and attended the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia before attending Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, where he graduated in 1906. While at Yale he roomed with Walter Dyson his second year and with Lawrence Simmons and Earl Patterson his third year. Thorne subsequently received his medical degree from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1910. At the University of Michigan, he was a founding member of the Epsilon chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. He briefly moved to Washington, DC, where he interned at Freedmen’s Hospital (later Howard University Hospital) from 1910-1911. He then moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where he practiced medicine from 1911 until his death. There he married Florence Elise Scanlan, with whom he had three children, and attended the Plymouth Congregational Church. Thorne was also a member of the Palmetto and National Medical associations as well as the Masons, and from 1933-1938 he served as VP of the Charleston Mutual Savings Bank. Thorne died in Charleston in 1942.

"Factors Fundamental in the Growth and Development of a People," Journal of the National Medical Association 16, no. 3 (1924).