John Fothergill was born near Richmond, Yorkshire. After working as an apothecary's apprentice, he studied under Alexander Monro primus at the University of Edinburgh, graduating MD in 1736. Fothergill moved to London and practised at St Thomas's Hospital before establishing his own practice in 1740. In 1744 he became the first Edinburgh graduate to be licensed by the Royal College of Physicians of London, though as a Quaker he could not become a Fellow. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1754 and of the Royal Society of Medicine in Paris in 1776. He died in London in 1780.
