John Hall (physician)

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For other people with similar names, see John Hall (disambiguation)

John Hall (died 1635) was a physician and son-in-law of William Shakespeare.

He was born at Carlton, Bedfordshire and studied at Queens' College, Cambridge from 1589, receiving a B.A. in 1593 and a M.A. in 1597. He became a physician, although he did not hold an English medical degree; it has been speculated that he studied medicine in France.

He established a practice in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was the only doctor in the town. He married Shakespeare's daughter Susanna on June 5, 1607. Their home in Stratford, Hall's Croft, is now open to the public. After Shakespeare's death, they moved into his former house at New Place. A few years after their marriage, they were involved in a court case after Susanna was slandered by a young man named John Lane. The case has been used as the subject of a play, The Herbal Bed, by Peter Whelan.

Notably, Hall prepared two notebooks of his case notes with the intention that they be published. After his death they were purchased and translated from Latin by Dr James Cooke who published them as Select observations on English bodies, or Cures both empericall and historicall performed upon very eminent persons in desperate diseases. The second notebook has been lost.