James McIlroy (surgeon)

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James McIlroy, full name James Archibald McIlroy (March 11, 1879 - July 30 1968) was a British surgeon and a member of Ernest Shackleton's crew on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-1916). He was born in Ulster, Ireland on November 3, 1879.

After McIroy earned his medical degree at Birmingham University, he was for a brief time a surgeon at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. He spent several of the following years practicing medicine in Egypt, Japan, and as a ship's surgeon on cruise ships in and around the East Indies.

In 1914 he was one of two physicians who was with Shackleton on the expedition to Antarctica. The other surgeon being Alexander Macklin. Among McIlroy's other duties on the journey was being in charge of the sled-dog team. Also, McIlroy performed the amputation of Perce Blackborow's gangrenous toes while the crew was stranded on Elephant Island. Dr. Alexander Macklin administered the chloroform anaesthesia. For his work on the expedition, he was awarded the Silver Polar Medal.

During World War I, he was badly wounded at Ypres. In 1921 McIlroy signed up as a surgeon with Shackleton on another polar expedition, (the Shackleton-Rowett Expedition), however Shacketon died on South Georgia Island and the mission was aborted. In World War II, McIroy was serving on the S.S. Oronsay when it was torpedoed off the coast of West Africa, and he spent five days on an open boat before being rescued by the French ship Dumont d’Urville. After the war, he remained a ship's surgeon well into his late seventies, he died in Surrey, England on July 30, 1968.


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