James Yonge

James Yonge (27 February 1646/1647 – 25 July 1721) was a Royal Navy surgeon from Plymouth, England, where his father was a surgeon. He went to sea as an apprentice surgeon as a young boy. Later he joined several voyages with Newfoundland fishing fleets. In his twenties he set up a practice in Plymouth and prospered. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1702 and Mayor of Plymouth for 1694–1695. He wrote medical textbooks and a journal of his life. Background Little is known of the forebears of James Yonge. His father's origins as a surgeon in the Plymouth area are unclear. He may have come from Ireland as a member of the Protestant ascendancy there. Yonge refers in his Journal to visiting his grandmother in Cork. The accounts in Burke's Landed Gentry that he descended from the Yonges of Colyton, Devon, are unfounded. Yonge's mother, Joanna Blackaller (1618–1700), was the daughter of Nicholas Blackaller, a merchant of Dartmouth, Devon. His parents were married in St Saviour's, Dartmouth, in September 1640. By the time Yonge was born, his parents had moved to Plymouth, where he was baptised in the Parish Church of St Andrew on 11 March 1647. He was the fifth of seven children, all of whom survived at least to early adulthood. There is a family story of a quarrel with his brother Nathaniel, who unlike Yonge was not a Royalist. There is evidence that they did not get on in Yonge's Journal.