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Author: Wharton, John

Biography:

WHARTON, John (1775-1829: ancestry.com)

He was an occasional contributor of poetry to periodicals but his first separately published work--an elegy of only 2 pages--appeared in Edinburgh in 1806 and was signed "John Wharton Virginiensis." He was the son of John and Sarah (Dawson) Wharton, born in Stevensburg, Culpeper County VA. He studied medicine in London and Edinburgh, as the title-page to his sole collection of poems indicates. He wrote a dissertation on mania, was granted his degree at Edinburgh in 1806, and returned to the US to set up a medical practice in the village of his birth. He was evidently a well-loved family physician but he also published at least one case study in a professional journal and became a trustee of the University of Virginia. In 1819 he wrote to Thomas Jefferson applying for the position of professor of medicine that was about to be created there, but was not successful. He introduced himself to Jefferson as a man of liberal education with a wife and four children, able to offer testimonials "from the first men in Virginia." (The names of his wife and children are not reliably recorded.) He died in Stevensburg on 24 Mar. 1829. By a weird coincidence, a book entitled Death-bed Scenes was advertised in some Southern papers between February and March that year as being by "the late John Wharton": the author was in fact William Wood, Vicar of Fulham, using the pseudonym "John Warton" presumably in homage to the literary Warton brothers Thomas and Joseph. (ancestry.com 27 Jan. 2021; WorldCat; "John Wharton to Thomas Jefferson, 5 July 1819, "Founders Online 27 Jan. 2021; Virginia Herald [Fredericksburg] 1 Apr. 1829)

 

Books written (1):

Winchester VA: printed for the author by J. Foster, 1814