Walter M. Prentice

Walter M. Prentice. , Walter M. Prentice, physician and army surgeon in the Civil War, was born in 1820 in Unionville, Lake County, Ohio, to Athalia and Noyes B. Prentice. Walter's father was a saddler who, in 1837, took part in military affairs as a captain of a cavalry company and after the death of his wife came to live in Cleveland with his daughter where he died in 1878 at the age of eighty-five years. Walter was the second child in the family. In 1850-51, he was practicing medicine in Canfield, Ohio. His younger brother, Noyes Billings Prentice, was studying medicine under him. By the time of the Civil War, the brothers had formed a partnership and were practicing medicine in Cleveland with an office on Pearl Street (W. 25th Street). Early in the Civil War Walter spent about two years working for the sanitary commission. He entered the army as a member of a Kentucky Regiment of Infantry and was promoted from regiment surgeon to battalion surgeon on the staff of General Frye. He became recognized as a “surgeon of rare ability." He was put in charge of the hospital at Point Burnside, Tennessee. Hospitals at that time were notoriously unhygienic and, while there, he contracted dysentery. While he was being taken to the officer's hospital in Louisville he died at Stanford, KY in 1864 at the age of 44 years. Married in 1847, Walter and his wife, Sarah, had two children: Frank and Thalia.