Henry Augustus Ellis

Henry Augustus Ellis was an Irish-born Australian physician and politician, born in Omagh, County Tyrone, in 1861. He studied medicine at Trinity College Dublin, qualifying in 1884 and 1885, and emigrated to New South Wales before settling in Western Australia in 1894. He served as honorary surgeon at Sydney Hospital and, from 1897, as government health officer and superintendent of the government sanatorium on the Coolgardie goldfields. A leading voice in the goldfields campaign for separation for federation, he sat for Coolgardie in the Western Australian Legislative Assembly from 1904 to 1905, first for Labor and then as an independent. After the First World War, in which he served as tuberculosis officer at Middlesbrough Hospital, he became assistant physician at a London chest hospital and practised in Harley Street as a tuberculosis specialist. He wrote on consumption and on hydrogen concentration in relation to disease, and died in Sussex in 1939.