James Lloyd was born on March 24, 1728 at Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York, United States, the youngest of ten children of Henry and Rebecca (Nelson) Lloyd. His grandfather, James Lloyd, emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts, about 1670 from Somersetshire, England, and became an important colonial merchant. His father, who had a large estate on Long Island, New York, was also a Boston merchant.
He received a preliminary education in a private school at New Haven, Connecticut.
Young Lloyd was apprenticed in medicine for five years to Dr. William Clark, one of the leading practitioners of Boston. He then went to England and spent two years in London, listening to lectures on midwifery by the first "man-midwife, " William Smellie, attending the demonstrations of the leading London surgeon of the time, William Cheselden, then at the height of his career, acting as a "dresser" at Guy's Hospital, and meeting and perhaps working with two young men, the brothers William and John Hunter, who were destined to revolutionize obstetrics and surgery even more completely than Smellie and Cheselden. Both were great influences in Lloyd's life, then and later.
Lloyd returned in 1752 to Boston, where he began the practice of surgery. Success came rapidly and completely; his practice became extensive. He made no contributions to medical literature; he was eminently a practitioner, not a scholar, although he had many pupils.
His handsome home was the center of fashionable Boston; his garden was noted, for he was somewhat of a practical as well as a scientific horticulturist; he numbered among his intimate friends, as well as patients, General Howe and Lord Percy. When war came, greatly to his credit, he remained in Boston as a physician; his only important medical contemporary, Silvester Gardiner, retired to Halifax. He rendered good service to both the remaining English, after the evacuation, and to the Americans; and Gen. Israel Putnam is said to have made his home with him on entering the town. He was, however, greatly shaken by the war; many of his more well-to-do patients had left Boston, his Long-Island estate, inherited from his father, had been partially destroyed by the British troops, who had cut down his woodland; and he was somewhat broken in health.
He made a half-hearted attempt to obtain compensation for the loss of his woodland and even went to London (1789) for the purpose. His claim was refused, unless he would become a British subject; this he steadfastly refused to do and, with his self-respect unimpaired, he returned home the same year emptyhanded. He lived through the reconstruction period after the Revolution, although life must have lost much of its zest. When Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse began vaccination for smallpox in Boston in 1800, by the Jennerian method, Lloyd saw the significance of the discovery and became an ardent advocate of it. After a long illness, Lloyd died at the age of eighty-two.
Lloyd was married to Sarah Corwin. She died in 1797. A son, James Lloyd, became United States senator from Massachusetts.
