John Huxham

John Huxham (1692 to 1768) was an English physician who practised in Plymouth and became the city's most respected medical practitioner, a provincial doctor notable for his study of fevers. Born close to Totnes in Devon, the son of a butcher, he was orphaned early and became the ward of a nonconformist minister. He attended the Exeter academy and the university of Leiden and finished his medical degree at Rheims, because his religion barred him from Oxford and Cambridge. From 1724 he kept weather records for the Royal Society and from 1728 to 1748 he noted monthly the prevalence of epidemic diseases, publishing these records in two volumes. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1739, published his Essay on Fevers in 1750 and received the Copley Medal in 1755. He was perhaps the first in Britain to classify influenza, is associated with the diagnosis of scurvy and a cider cure for it, and gave his name to a tincture of cinchona bark used for ulcerous sore throat. He died on 11 August 1768.