Dr John, an eminent physician, was born of Quaker parents, in 1712, at Carr End in Yorkshire. 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, and at Sedburgh in Yorkshire. Having served his time to an apothecary at Bradford, he removed to London, and became a pupil of Dr Wilmot, at St Thomas's Hospital. He then went to the university of Edinburgh for the purpose of studying medicine, and there took his 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, as well as of the Royal and Antiquarian Societies. He continued his practice with uninterrupted success till within the last two years of his life, when an illness, which had been brought on by unremitting labours, 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 devoted his leisure to conchology and smaller objects of botany. His pamphlet on the ulcerous sore throat is the best of his publications, but it owes much of its merit to the prior information of 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. 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 and 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. 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 £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 Winchmore Hill. The doctor by his will appointed that his shells and other specimens of natural history should be offered to Dr Hunter at £500 under the valuation which he had ordered to be taken of them, and accordingly Dr Hunter bought them for £1200. His drawings and collections in natural history were also offered to Sir Joseph Banks 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.