(Dr George), was born in Westmoreland in 1705, where his family had been long seated on a competent estate that had descended regularly for several generations. After 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 in 1760. He was the author of a collection of much esteemed sermons, in 2 vols 8vo. The first volume consists of occasional discourses, published by himself; the second printed from his MSS.

(Dr John), a late eminent physician, son of John and Margaret, quakers, was born in 1712, at Carr End in Yorkshire, where his father, who had been a brewer at Knaresborough (after having traveled from one end of America to the other), lived retired on a small estate which he cultivated. The Doctor was the second of five children (four sons and a daughter), 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 Sedburg in Yorkshire. He afterwards served his time to one Mr Bartlett an apothecary at Bradford. From thence 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 to study physic, and took his doctor's degree there. From Edinburgh he went to Leyden; whence, 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 greatest part of his life, and acquired most of his fortune. In 1746, he was admitted a licentiate of the college of physicians in London; and in 1754 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 both of the Royal and Antiquarian Societies. He continued his practice with uninterrupted success till within the last two years of his life, when the illness which had brought on himself 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, improved by his friend Peter Collinson, and employed himself on conchology and smaller objects of botany. He was for many years a valuable contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine; where his observations on the weather and diseases were begun in April 1751, and discontinued in the beginning of 1756, being disappointed in his views of exciting other experienced physicians in different parts to imitate the example. He had very extensive practice, but he did not add to his art any great or various improvements. His pamphlet on the ulcerous sore throat is, on every account, the best of his publications; but owes much of its merit to the information of the late Dr Letherland. It was first printed in 1748, on the re-appearance of that fatal disorder which in 1739 had carried off the two only sons of Mr Pelham. In 1762 Dr Fothergill purchased an estate at Upton in Essex; and formed a botanic garden there, the second in Europe: Kew is the first. In 1776 he began regularly to withdraw from Midsummer to Michaelmas, from the excessive fatigue of his profession, to Lee Hall, near Middlewich, in Cheshire; which, though he only rented it by the year, he had spared no expense to improve. He took no fees during this recess, but attended to prescribe gratis at an inn at Middlewich once a-week. In 1767, after he found himself obliged to relax his attention to business, he removed from his house in the city, to reside in Harpur-street, Red-Lion Square. Some time before his death he had been industrious 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 prefixed to his account of the voyage to the South Seas. At his expense also was made and printed an entire new translation of the whole Bible, from the Hebrew and Greek originals, by Anthony Parver, 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 Acworth, 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 on account of distance. The Doctor himself first projected this on the plan of a smaller institution of the same kind at Gildersome. He also endowed it handsomely by his will. It now contains above 300 children of both sexes, who are cloathed and instructed. Among the other benevolent schemes suggested by Dr Fothergill were those of bringing fish to London by land carriage, which, though it did not in every respect succeed, tended to destroy a supposed combination; and of rendering bread much cheaper, though equally wholesome, to the poor, by making it with one part of potatoes and three parts of household flour. But his public benefactions, his encouragements of science, the instances of his attention to the health, the police, the convenience of the metropolis, &c., we cannot pretend to specify. The fortune which Dr Fothergill had acquired was immense; and, taking all things together, the house and moveables in Harpur-street, the property in Essex, and the estate in Cheshire (which he held on a lease), and his ready money, amounted to £80,000. His business when he was in full practice was calculated at near £7,000 per annum. In the influenza of 1775 and 1776, he is said to have had 60 patients on his list daily, and his profit was estimated at £800 per annum.

The disorder which hastened his death was a scirrhus of the prostatic, and an obstruction in the bladder (in which were found after his death two quarts of water), which had been gradually coming on him for six years past, occasioned by a delicacy, which made him unwilling to alight from his carriage; and when, after his temporary recovery from it the year before he died, he submitted to use relief in his carriage, it was too late. He died at his house in Harpur-street, December 26, 1780; and his remains were interred, January 5, in the Quakers burying ground at Winchmore hill, whither they were accompanied by more than 70 coaches and post-chaises, notwithstanding the intention of the executors to have the funeral private. The Doctor by his will appointed, that his shells, and other pieces of natural history, should be offered to the late Dr Hunter at £500 under the valuation he ordered to be taken of them. Accordingly Dr Hunter bought them for £1,200. The drawings and collections in natural history were also to be offered to Mr (now Sir Joseph) Banks at a valuation. His English portraits and prints, which had been collected by Mr John Nickoll, of Ware, and purchased by him for 80 guineas, were bought for 200 guineas by Mr Thane. His books were sold by auction, April 30, 1781, and the eight following days. His house and garden at Upton, in which 15 men were constantly employed, were valued at £10,000. He spared no expense to augment this as well as his other collections. He had an ingenious artist qualified to collect for him at the Cape of Good Hope, and another on the Alps, and employed for several years before his death a painter in natural history at Leeds.

Dr Fothergill's character was excellent. A transaction, indeed, with regard to one Dr Leeds, gave occasion to some of his enemies to blame him; but how unjustly, has been abundantly shown by his biographers Dr Elliott and Dr Lettme. Besides the pamphlet already mentioned, Dr Fothergill wrote a considerable number of Tracts, which are now collected into one volume 8vo, by Dr Elliott. He sometimes wrote in the newspapers, and is said to have been the author of more than 100 letters in the Gazeteer concerning the New Pavement.