James Mitchell (New South Wales politician)

James Mitchell (1789 – 1 February 1869) was a Scottish-born Australian surgeon and politician.

He was born in Fife to farmer David Mitchell and Margaret Low. In 1810 he enlisted in the Army Medical Corps, and he qualified as a surgeon at Edinburgh in 1813. He served in the Napoleonic Wars and in the Battle of New Orleans. In 1821 he arrived in Sydney, and in 1823 was appointed assistant surgeon at Sydney Hospital. He was a surgeon there from 1829 to 1837, and established his own private practice in the 1830s. On 22 August 1833 he married Augusta Maria Scott, with whom he had three children. He had land in the Hunter River district and was a founder and director of the Australian Mutual Provident Society. He was a non-elective member of the New South Wales Legislative Council from 1855 to 1856 and a member of the reconstituted body from 1856 to 1861 and from 1861 to 1869, when he died.^[1]

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