Dr Fothergill

John Fothergill FRS (1712 - 1780) was an English physician, plant collector, philanthropist and Quaker. He is credited with first identifying and naming trigeminal neuralgia in his work Of a painful affection of the face in 1765. John Fothergill made a study of conchology and botany. At Upton, near Stratford, he had an extensive botanical garden where he 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 protege 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. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1763. He was the patron of Sydney Parkinson, the South Sea voyager, and also of William Bartram, the American botanist in his Southern travels 1773-1776. One foxing spot.