James Thomson Paton was born at Trial Bay where his father Robert Thomson Paton (later to become Director General of Public Health for NSW) was the first medical officer to the Gaol. `Hamish', as he was more familiarly known, grew up in Dawes Point. He was educated at Sydney Grammar School and later at Sydney University from which he graduated in 1911. He originally practised in Blackheath and on the outbreak of war joined the AIF. On the troopship his health deteriorated and he was returned to Australia. After the War he practised first in Millthorpe and then in Orange as a physician in general practice. He was a partner of the redoubtable Sir Neville Howse, the first Australian VC, and his brother Jack who forewent an appointment in London as surgeon to the King to join Neville in Orange - a formidable pair.

Hamish was an avid and voracious reader with catholic tastes; Lewis Carroll would stir him to laughter till the tears rolled down his cheeks, while Byron, Tennyson and Shakespeare were forever at his bedside to comfort him in the early hours after a difficult confinement or the death of a patient who would have been his friend. Cardinal Newman he read with unbridled enthusiasm, probably more for his prose than his theology. Generous to a fault, his hand was always in his pocket to assist those of his patients who were less than affluent in those days before social services, but like many of his contemporaries he fiercely opposed political intrusion into what he saw as the caring profession.

He carried a heavy burden in the Second World War as medical manpower was short, but found time to enjoy his grandchildren who came home to him while their fathers were overseas. He eventually died in the home from which he had practised for so many years.