James McClurg

James McClurg (1746 to 1823) was an American physician in colonial and early republic Virginia. A graduate of the College of William and Mary, he took his medical degree at the University of Edinburgh in 1770 and also studied in London and Paris. His Experiments upon the Human Bile and Reflections on the Biliary Secretions, published in London in 1772, was translated into several languages, and he was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1774. During the Revolutionary War he served as a surgeon and was appointed Physician General and Director of Hospitals for Virginia military forces in 1777. In 1779 he became the first holder of the chair of anatomy and medicine at William and Mary, later practised in Richmond, worked against epidemics including the yellow fever of 1798, and served as president of the Virginia State Medical Society in 1820 and 1821. He also sat in the Virginia delegation at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787.