James H. Southall

James H. Southall was a physician and co-founder of the Medical Department of the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Southall was born to Turner and Alice A. (Wright) Southall in Smithfield, Isle of Wight County, Virginia, and grew up in Norfolk, Virginia. He studied medicine under physician Robert Tunstall in that city before attending lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in 1859-1860, and at the University of Louisiana in 1860-1861. He graduated from the University of Louisiana on March 1, 1861. Within weeks he joined the Fifty-fifth Virginia Infantry as a surgeon to the Confederacy in the Civil War. After the war he relocated briefly to Norfolk before emigrating to Memphis and then Crittenden County, Arkansas. In 1872 he arrived in Little Rock.

In 1879 he co-founded what was originally called the Medical Department of the Arkansas Industrial University. Until 1886 he held the chair of physiology at the school, and then became chair of theory and practice.