Fothergill, John Milner (1841-1888)

Purchased from Hodgson's, London, March 1916 (acc.38715), Sotheby's, London, February 1933 (acc.65813), presented by Mrs. Fothergill, September 1927 (acc.67370); retrospectively accessioned in November 1933 (acc.69296) and January 1951 (acc.95813) after transfer from Wellcome Museum offices and stores, previous provenance not noted, although the former seems likely to have been a donation by Forthergill's family.

John Milner Fothergill was born on 11 April 1841 at Westmorland. He attended the University of Edinburgh and graduated MD in 1865, in the latter year obtaining the licences of both the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. In 1869 he became senior resident medical officer at the Leeds Public Dispensary and while working there he began experimental research into the operation of digitalis upon the heart, for which he was awarded the Hastings gold medal of the British Medical Association in 1870. He subsequently studied abroad at Vienna and Berlin before settling in London where he became a member of the Royal College of Physicians and brought out his first book, The Heart and its Diseases in 1872. During the 1870s Fothergill carried out a series of experiments for the British Medical Association on the mutual antagonism of various poisons. His discovery that belladonna (atropine) and strychnia would neutralize the effect of aconite on respiration, led to his being awarded the Fothergilllian gold medal of the Medical Society of London for his essay ''The Antagonism of Therapeutic Agents.'' Fothergill was a prolific writer and contributed extensively to the medical press especially on topics such as gout, digestion and diet as well as publishing on a variety of non-medical subjects. He acquired great fame in the United States after he publilshed The Practitioners' Handbook of Treatment in 1876, a pragmatic and useful work that proved widely popular. He died of diabetes on 28 June 1888.