Background
His parents, Capt. Oswell and Aphra Anna (Pritchard) Eve, were of Anglo-Irish descent, his father a brother of Joseph Eve.
His parents, Capt. Oswell and Aphra Anna (Pritchard) Eve, were of Anglo-Irish descent, his father a brother of Joseph Eve.
He attended Franklin College (now the University of Georgia) at Athens, where he was given the degree of B. A. in 1826.
Following graduation he went to Philadelphia, entering the office of Dr. Charles D. Meigs to study medicine and at the same time matriculating at the University of Pennsylvania.
Here he obtained his degree of M. D. in 1828, then returned to Augusta, where he spent a year in practise.
He settled for practise in Augusta, where, in 1832, he participated in the organization of the Medical College of Georgia.
He remained at the Louisville school through but one course, resigning on account of the illness of his wife.
The next two years he spent in the clinics of the most famous surgeons of London and Paris.
In the latter city, he “participated professionally” in the revolution of July 1831.
Later, when the Russian army was reported marching upon Warsaw, he offered his services to the Polish government and served in a Warsaw hospital, and later with the Polish forces in the field.
Following the fall of Warsaw he returned to Paris, and later in the same year to the United States.
On the faculty of this school he was professor of surgery until 1850, when he resigned to take the same chair at the University of Louisville, made vacant by the resignation of Samuel D. Gross.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, he was appointed surgeon-general of Tennessee, later was chief surgeon of General Joseph E. Johnston’s army, and still later surgeon in the Gate City Hospital, in Atlanta.
After the close of the war, he resumed the teaching of surgery, first at Missouri Medical College, St. Louis, later at the University of Nashville, and finally in 1877, at the newly organized Nashville Medical College.
Shortly after this last change he died suddenly while calling upon a patient.
He perfected an operation for vesical calculus which was highly successful.
His experience with this operation was reported in “A Synopsis and Analysis of One Hundred Cases of Lithotomy” (Transactions of the American Medical Association, vol. XXII, 1871).
In addition to the teaching positions that he occupied, he was compelled to decline many flattering offers of similar positions.
He was for a time co-editor of the Southern Medical and Surgical Journal and assistant editor of the Nashville Journal of Medicine and Surgery.
He contributed nearly six hundred articles to periodical literature.
Eve had an unusual experience in military surgery.
In addition to his service with the Polish army and in the Civil War, during his professorship at the Medical College of Georgia he served in the Mexican War and he was present as an observer at the battles of Magenta and Solferino in Italy in 1859.
Myopic from childhood and afflicted with tone deafness, he overcame these handicaps by methodical industry.
He used neither alcohol nor tobacco at a time when their use was general.
He was president of the American Medical Association in 1857-58.
His portrait, taken in middle life, shows a serious face with full beard, large nose, and prominent eyes, looking out through thick lenses.
He married Sarah Louisa Twiggs, grand-daughter of Gen. Twiggs of the Revolutionary War.
She died in 1851, and in the following year he married Sarah Ann Duncan, daughter of a South Carolina clergyman. To this marriage, two sons and a daughter were born, the two sons taking up the profession of their father.
