Queer Places:
20 S Battery, Charleston, SC 29401

Dr Duncan Pringle (February 14, 1910 - December 21, 2000) was a Charleston physician and social activist. Her family had long been prominent in Charleston society: her grandfather owned the South Carolina and Pacific Railroad and a cotton mill; her father was a local banker; her mother was a communist. Duncan tried to improve the lives of those on the margins of Charleston society.

Duncan McColl Pringle was the daughter of Ernest Henry Pringle (1881–1955) and Nellora "Nell or Nellie" Thomas McColl (1879–1937), of Bennettsville, S.C., the daughter of banker Duncan Donald McColl (1842-1911). Nellora married Ernest Henry Pringle of Charleston in 1906, and they were the parents of Mary Ford Pringle (1907-1993), twin daughters Eleanor Pringle (1910-2004) and Dorothy Duncan Pringle (1910- 2000), Clara Margaretta Pringle (1912-2000), Ernest Henry Pringle, Jr. (1914-1938), and McColl Pringle (1915-2003).

Dawn Langley Simmons visited her friend Dr. Duncan Pringle in 1966. Duncan encouraged Hall to meet Margaretta or Margarita Pringle Childs, her sister. Margarita remembers Hall as a "nonstop talker who spoke intelligently against the death penalty." Dr Duncan Pringle worked awfully hard on her practice. The black class got a greater quality of medical treatment than they would have had she not been there. Back then, the white doctors would always say that the white patients wouldn't like it if they had blacks in the same waiting room and they couldn't afford two rooms. Duncan was the kind of person who, if she met a black couple in the park, she would invite them home for lunch or to stay a couple of days. On the recommendation of Dr. Pringle, Gordon Langley Hall visited the Medical College of Charleston, where a gynecologist, H. Oliver Williamson, told her that she was a "transsexual": "I can honestly say that I had never heard the word. Of course I had heard of sex-changes. The Christine Jorgenson story was universal.... I asked him exactly what a transsexual was. He explained that although I was not normal in the sense that other men or women might be normal, neither was I "a homosexual." This latter was interesting for although I had never felt at ease with so-called normal people, neither had I been happy in the company of the other kind."


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