John McCosh

John McCosh or John MacCosh or James McCosh (Kirkmichael, Ayrshire, 5 March 1805 – 18 January / 16 March 1885) was a Scottish army surgeon who made hobbyist photographs whilst serving in India and Burma. His photographs during the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848–49) of people and places associated with the British rule in India (for which he is best known), and of the Second Burmese War (1852–53), count as sufficient grounds, some historians maintain, to recognise him as the first war photographer known by name. McCosh wrote a number of books on medicine and photography as well as books of poetry.

Roddy Simpson has written of McCosh's photographs that "Given the circumstances, these images are a considerable achievement and, regardless of artistic merit, are historically very important". Taylor and Schaaf have written that "McCosh fashioned compositions that were exceptional for the period" and that unlike his contemporaries "in his hands, photography was not merely a pastime but became the means of recording history."

In 1831, aged 26, McCosh became an assistant surgeon in the Indian Medical Service (Bengal), in the army of the East India Company, and served with its Bengal Army.

He saw active service on the north-east frontier of India against the Kol people in 1832–1833.

On 11 October 1833, on sick leave with a tropical disease, the barque on which he was sailing from Madras to Hobart in Tasmania, Australia, was wrecked off the desolate and remote Amsterdam Island in the southern Indian Ocean. Of the 97 people aboard, 21 survived, with McCosh the only surviving passenger. They were rescued on 26 October by a US sealing schooner, General Jackson, and taken to Mauritius. He wrote a book describing his experience, Narrative of the Wreck of the Lady Munro, on the Desolate Island of Amsterdam, October, 1833 (1835).

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