COLUMBIA --- They call him Dr. Ben.

Not because he's young, though he is. Or because they watched him grow up, though they did.

They call him Dr. Ben because calling him Dr. Pinner gets confusing -- an occupational hazard when you work with your physician father.

In July, Dr. Ben Pinner joined his father, Dr. Carroll Pinner III, in his Peak medical practice, carrying on a family tradition dating back nearly a century.

Dr. Ben's great-grandfather Dr. Carroll Pinner Sr. started the Pinner Clinic in Peak in 1915. The family long thought the founding date to be 1917 but recently discovered the date is more likely two years earlier.

In the years since, four generations of Pinners have doctored their rural community, where names and relations are as important as attending church, farming and hunting -- Carroll Sr.; Carroll Jr. and his wife, Harriett; Carroll III and now Ben.

Dr. Ben remembers as a boy spending Sunday afternoons picking up trash and cigarette butts around the grounds of the clinic.

He remembers his first patient more fondly. He might have been 7 or 8.

The details are a little fuzzy: an after-hours call, a patient with chest pain, needing to go to the clinic with his dad.

Dr. Ben knows for sure it was an emergency situation. He held the back door open as the woman was wheeled to a waiting ambulance.

Dr. Ben, now 30, continues to help his father, lightening the load for Dr. Carroll III and the clinic's other practicing partner, Dr. John Ferguson.

The Pinner Clinic and its family-practice physicians are a rarity these days. They accept walk-in patients, and house calls aren't unheard of. Before Dr. Ben joined the clinic, the doctors had, on rare occasions, seen 80 to 120 patients in a day.

The decision to become a physician was his, Dr. Ben said. He never felt pressure from his father to go into medicine and only doubted his path for a brief period in college at Wake Forest University. At that time, he tried to imagine what else he'd do, but medicine was what interested him.

That choice led him to the Medical University of South Carolina, the same medical school his grandfather and great-grandfather attended.

Dinah Pinner, Dr. Ben's mother and Dr. Carroll's wife, said she'd always pegged her son as a pediatrician.

"Folks are telling me he is shaping up to be a good family practitioner," she said.

Dr. Carroll said he never worried about whether his son would follow him into the family business. Yet he admits to a few father and son chats and "chokings" over a few grades.

Mabel Cromer, of Peak, has been coming to the Pinner Clinic her entire life. At 83, that means she's called each Pinner physician her own. She now sees Dr. Ben and says she appreciates his bedside manner.

On a recent visit, Ms. Cromer showed Dr. Ben some brown spots on her skin.

"He said, 'You're just aging gracefully,' instead of saying you're getting old," she said with a smile. "He's so sweet."