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.

[2] In 1745, Fothergill gave a brief lecture to the Royal Society of London, citing the work of a Scottish physician and surgeon, William Tossach (c. 1700–1771).

[1] 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".

[10] Fothergill was the patron of Sydney Parkinson, the South Sea voyager, and of William Bartram, the American botanist in his southern travels of 1773–1776.

[12] Fanny Burney, having earlier described him as "an upright, stern old man... an old prig," later recorded when she was his patient: "He really has been... amazingly civil and polite to me... as kind as he is skilful."