James Russell (surgeon)

Prof James Russell FRSE RSA (1754–1836) was a Scottish surgeon who was the first Professor of Clinical Surgery at the University of Edinburgh. He was President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and was a co-founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1805 he published one of the earliest descriptions of direct inguinal hernia.

He was born in Edinburgh. His father, also James Russell (d 1773), was a surgeon who became Deacon (President) of the Incorporation of Surgeons in 1752. He gave up his surgical career to take up the Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1764 succeeding Adam Ferguson who had become Professor of Moral Philosophy. James Russell senior was a cousin of the chemist Joseph Black. He married Margaret Balfour of Pilrig, great aunt to Robert Louis Stevenson. Their son, James Russell, was educated at the Royal High School from 1761 to 1764 and then studied medicine at Edinburgh University.

James Russell followed his father into a surgical career. He became a Fellow of the Incorporation of Surgeons in 1777, a year before it became the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. From 1780-1792 he served as College Librarian and in 1796 was elected President of the College. From 1800 he was appointed one of six surgeons-in-ordinary on the staff of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. In 1803 he published an article "Singular variety of Hernia" in which he gave a clear description of direct inguinal hernia, one of the earliest published accounts of the difference between the direct and indirect varieties. in 1804 all six Infirmary surgeons were given the right to deliver lectures on surgery. Russell had been giving a private surgery lecture course since 1786 and his lectures appear to have been well received. In an effort to expand this aspect of his career, he was drawn into the controversy over the establishment of a Chair of Clinical Surgery at the University of Edinburgh.

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