James McClurg (1746 – July 9, 1823) was an American physician and Founding Father who served as a delegate to the Philadelphia Convention which drafted the United States Constitution in 1787. McClurg served as the 18th, 21st, and 24th mayor of Richmond, Virginia. His lifelong friendship with Thomas Jefferson dated from their school days. Medical career James McClurg was one of the most distinguished physicians in the colonies. He was a graduate of the College of William and Mary, where he later served as a professor, and received his medical degree from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland in 1770. He also studied in London and Paris. McClurg practiced first in Williamsburg, then in Richmond. McClurg's work and writings were respected by the medical community on both sides of the Atlantic. His Experiments upon the Human Bile and Reflections on the Biliary Secretions (London: 1772), was translated into several languages. In 1774, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. McClurg served as a surgeon of the American navy in Hampton, Virginia during the American Revolutionary War and was appointed Physician General and Director of Hospitals for Virginia's military forces in 1777. On December 4, 1779, the Board of Visitors at the College of William and Mary voted to appoint McClurg as the first Chair of Anatomy and Medicine at the college, a position he held until moving to Richmond and returning to private practice in 1784. McClurg achieved renown in Richmond for his efforts to stop various epidemics, including the yellow fever in 1798. However, his contagious disease focus later brought criticism in connection with the botched toxicological work in the celebrated trial concerning the murder of Judge George Wythe, whom he initially thought suffered from cholera, not arsenic poisoning. McClurg was also the first honoree of the Philadelphia Journal of Medical and Physical Sciences. In 1820 and 1821 McClurg was president of Virginia's State Medical Society. Public service To prevent the Francophobic Arthur Lee (diplomat) from becoming The Continental Congress's first Secretary of Foreign Affairs in 1781, James Madison, still wanting to vote for a Virginian, nominated McClurg as a third candidate, along with the previously-nominated Lee and Robert R. Livingston (chancellor). The French minister, Anne-César, Chevalier de la Luzerne, thereafter convinced New Jersey's John Witherspoon, who was paradoxically a pro-Lee Francophile, that diplomatic troubles would likely ensue should Lee be elected, and Witherspoon abstained, tilting New Jersey's