John Mitchell
John Mitchell
British, 1711–1768
Details of the life of John Mitchell (1711-1768) were little known until the publication of a biography by botanical historians Edmund and Dorothy Smith Berkeley (Berkeley & Berkeley 1974)....
Mitchell was from a merchant/planting family in Virginia that was sufficiently well off to send him to the University of Edinburgh. He received his M.A. in 1729, and studied medicine there until late 1731, although he does not seem to have actually received a medical degree. He returned to Virginia to practice medicine. Like many doctors educated at Edinburgh in the eighteenth century, Mitchell acquired a strong interest in botany. On his return to the colonies, he began to pursue his botanical studies in earnest, acquiring for himself a significant place in North American natural history. In 1745, even as he argued that the source of a series of epidemics afflicting Virginia were the unsanitory troop ships from Britain, Mitchell fell ill himself and was forced to quit Virginia. He returned to Britain and regained his health. It was only then that he developed his interest in maps and map-making.
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