John Fothergill (physician)

John Fothergill FRS (8 March 1712 – 26 December 1780) was an English physician, plant collector, philanthropist and Quaker. His medical writings were influential, and he built up a sizeable botanic garden in what is now West Ham Park in London.

Fothergill was born at Carr End, near Bainbridge in Yorkshire, the son of John Fothergill (1676–1745), a Quaker preacher and farmer, and his first wife, Margaret Hough (1677–1719). After studying at Sedbergh School, Fothergill was apprenticed to an apothecary. He later took the degree of M. D. at Edinburgh, in 1736, followed by further studies at St Thomas's Hospital, London. After visiting continental Europe in 1740, he settled in London, where he gained an extensive practice. For example, during the epidemics of influenza in 1775 and 1776 he is said to have treated sixty patients a day.

In 1745, he gave a brief lecture to the Royal Society of London, citing the work of a Scottish physician and surgeon, William Tossach (c. 1700 – 1771), which is the first known lecture on the practice of mouth-to-mouth ventilation. He is credited with first identifying and naming trigeminal neuralgia in his work Of a Painful Affection of the Face in 1765.

Fothergill's pamphlet, Account of the Sore Throat attended with Ulcers (1748), contains one of the first descriptions of in English, and was translated into several languages. His rejection of ineffective traditional therapies for this disease saved many lives. He also supported the publication of Benjamin Franklin's papers on electricity, and wrote a preface for them.

In his leisure, John Fothergill made a study of conchology and botany. In 1762 he bought Upton House near Stratford, London and in its grounds he built up an extensive botanical garden and grew many rare plants obtained from various parts of the world (now West Ham Park). In the garden, with its glasshouses, John Coakley Lettsom (1744–1815), a Quaker physician and a protégé of his, exclaimed that "the sphere seemed transposed, as the Arctic Circle joined with the equator". Lettsom published a catalogue of the plants of Fothergill's garden Hortus Uptonensis, or a catalogue of the plants in the Dr. Fothergill’s garden at Upton, at the time of his decease anno 1780.Fothergilla is named in his honour.

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