Edward Warren: Surgeon to Three Armies

Born in Tyrrell County in eighteen twenty-eight, Edward Warren built one of the most unusual medical careers of the nineteenth century. He studied in Paris, became a professor at the University of Maryland, and when the Civil War began he returned south to serve the Confederacy, rising to Surgeon General of North Carolina and chief surgeon of the North Carolina navy. After the war, Warren later went abroad and in eighteen seventy-five accepted the post of chief surgeon to the Egyptian khedive.

There he performed a landmark surgery removing a tumor from a senior Egyptian official and was granted the honorary title of Bey. He eventually settled in Paris, where he died in eighteen ninety-three. His path from this corner of North Carolina to the courts of Cairo remains one of the stranger journeys of his era.