David Ramsay, physician, politician, and historian, was born on 2 April 1749 in Drumore Township, Pennsylvania. After obtaining a medical degree from the College of Pennsylvania, he moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where he established a practice and advocated for formal medical education. A surgeon during the Revolutionary War, he also served in the Continental Congress and (for a combined twenty-seven years) the South Carolina state legislature. In 1789 he published a two-volume History of the American Revolution. Ramsay married three times: in 1775 to Sabina Ellis (d.