Prain

Sir David Prain CMG, CIE, M.D., FRS FRSE LLD (11 July 1857 – 16 March 1944) was a Scottish physician remembered as a noted amateur botanist.

Born to David Prain, a saddler, and his wife Mary Thomson, in Fettercairn, Scotland, in 1857, Prain attended the Fettercairn Parish School and then Aberdeen Grammar School. He then studied Medicine at the University of Aberdeen, where he gained his M.A. in 1878. After teaching for two years at Ramsgate College, he returned to Aberdeen and thence to the University of Edinburgh, earning an MB ChM in 1883 with highest honours. He was demonstrator of anatomy at the College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1882 and 1883, and at the University of Aberdeen in 1883 and 1884.

In 1884 Prain was recommended to Sir George King (1840–1909), home on leave from his position as director of the Royal Botanic Garden at Calcutta and looking for a medical student with botanical interests to enter the Indian Medical Service. Prain duly went to India as a physician / botanist in the Indian Medical Service, and in 1887 was appointed curator of the Calcutta herbarium.

In 1888 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Sir Andrew Douglas Maclagan, Argyll Robertson, Alexander Crum Brown, and Sir William Turner.

In 1898 he was promoted to Director of the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta as well as the Botanical Survey of India, and superintendent of Cinchona Cultivation in Bengal, remaining there until 1905. From 1898 to 1905 he also served as Professor of Botany at the Medical College of Calcutta. In 1905 he became Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire (CIE) in the 1906 Birthday Honours by King Edward VII . In 1912 he was knighted by King George V.

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