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. Life and work 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. In 1736, he obtained the degree of Doctor of Medicine at Edinburgh and followed this 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. During the influenza epidemics of 1775 and 1776 he is said to have treated 60 patients a day. 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). This is the first known lecture on the practice of mouth-to-mouth ventilation. He is also credited with first identifying and naming trigeminal neuralgia in his work Of a Painful Affection of the Face in 1773. He also wrote about angina and diphtheria. Fothergill's pamphlet Account of the Sore Throat attended with Ulcers (1748) contains one of the first descriptions of streptococcal sore throat in English and was translated into several languages. His rejection of ineffective traditional therapies for the disease saved many lives. He was a personal friend of Benjamin Franklin. He also supported the publication of Franklin's papers on electricity and wrote a preface to them. Botanist and Quaker Fothergill made a study of conchology and botany in his leisure time. In 1762, he bought Upton House in West Ham, Essex (now in Greater London), where 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 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. The standard author abbreviation Foth. is