FOTHERGILL, Dr George, was born in Westmoreland in 1705, where his family had long possessed a competent estate, which had descended regularly for several generations. After receiving an academical education in Queen’s College, Oxford, of which he became a fellow, he was, in 1751, elected principal of St Edmund’s Hall, and presented to the vicarage of Brumley in Hampshire. Having been long afflicted with an asthma, he died of that disease in 1760, at the age of fifty-five. He was the author of a collection of sermons, in 2 vols. 8vo; the first consisting of occasional discourses, published by himself, and the second being printed from his manuscripts.

Fothergill, Dr John, an eminent physician, was born of Quaker parents, in 1712, at Carr End in Yorkshire, where his father, who had been a brewer at Knaresborough, lived retired on a small estate which he cultivated. The doctor was the second of five children, and received his education under the care of his grandfather Thomas Hough, a person of fortune in Cheshire (which gave him a predilection for that county), and at Sedbergh in Yorkshire. Having served his time to Mr Bartlett, an apothecary at Bradford, he removed to London, and became a pupil of Dr, afterwards Sir Edward, Wilmot, at St Thomas’s Hospital. He then went to the university of Edinburgh for the purpose of studying physic, and there took his doctor’s degree. From Edinburgh he went to Leyden, but after a short stay he returned to London, and began to practise about the year 1740, in a house in White-hart Court, Lombard Street, where he resided during the greater part of his life, and acquired most of his fortune. In 1746 he was admitted as a licentiate of the College of Physicians in London; and in 1754 as a fellow of that of Edinburgh, to which he was a considerable benefactor. He afterwards became a member of the Royal Medical Society at Paris, and a member of both the Royal and Antiquarian Societies. He continued his practice with uninterrupted success till within the two last years of his life, when an illness, which had been brought on by unremitting attention, obliged him to give up a considerable part of it. Besides his application to medical science, he had imbibed an early taste for natural history, and employed himself on conchology and smaller objects of botany. He had a very extensive practice, but he did not add to his art any great or important improvements. His pamphlet on the ulcerous sore throat is the best of his publications, but it owes much of its merit to the information of the late Dr Letherland. It was printed in the year 1748, on the re-appearance of that fatal disorder which in 1739 had carried off the two sons of Mr Pelham. In 1762 Dr Fothergill purchased an estate at Upton in Essex, and there formed a botanic garden. In 1766 he began, between Midsummer and Michaelmas, to withdraw from the excessive fatigue of his profession, and took no fees during this recess. For some time before his death he had been endeavouring to contrive a method of generating and preserving ice in the West Indies. He was the patron of Sidney Parkinson, and drew up the preface to his account of the voyage to the South Seas. At his expense also was made and printed an entirely new translation of the Bible, from the Hebrew und Greek originals, by Anthony Purver, a Quaker, in two volumes, 1764, folio; and also, in 1780, an edition of Bishop Percy’s Key to the New Testament, adapted to the use of a seminary of young Quakers, at Ackworth, near Leeds in Yorkshire, founded in 1778 by the Society, who purchased, by a subscription, in which Dr Fothergill stood foremost, the house and an estate of thirty acres which the Foundling Hospital held there, but which they found inconvenient for their purpose. The doctor himself first projected this on the plan of a smaller institution of the same kind at Gildersomes, and endowed it handsomely by his will. It now contains above three hundred children of both sexes, who are clothed and instructed. Amongst the other beneficent schemes suggested by Dr Fothergill, were those of bringing fish to London by land carriage, which, though it did not in every respect succeed, certainly tended to destroy a supposed combination; and of rendering bread much cheaper, though equally wholesome, to the poor, by making it of one part of potatoes mixed with three parts of household flour. But all his public benefactions, his encouragement of science, and the instances of his attention to the health, police, and convenience of the metropolis, we cannot pretend to specify. The fortune which Dr Fothergill had acquired was great, amounting to about L.80,000. His business, when in full practice, was calculated at near L.7000 per annum. In the influenza of 1775 and 1776, he is said to have had sixty patients on his list daily, and his profits were estimated at L.8000 per annum. The disorder which hastened his death was a schirrus of the prostate gland, and an obstruction of the bladder. He died at his house in Harpur Street, in the month of December 1780, and his remains were interred in the Quakers’ burying-ground at Winch-more Hill. The doctor by his will appointed that his shells and other pieces of natural history should be offered to Dr Hunter at L.500 under the valuation which he had order, ed to be taken of them, and accordingly Dr Hunter bought them for L.1200. His drawings and collections in natural history were also offered to Sir Joseph Bankes at a valuation. His English portraits and prints, which had been purchased by him for eighty guineas, were bought by Mr Thane for two hundred guineas. His books were sold by public auction.