John Bostock (1773-1846), British physician. Bostock was born in Liverpool and educated in London and Edinburgh. For a while after graduating he practised medicine in Liverpool, but in 1817 he moved to London. In 1819 he described hay fever as an infection of the upper resporatory tract. He was the first to realise that the concentrations of urea and of albumen in the blood and urine were linked. He taught chemistry at Guy's Hospital in London and in 1826 was president of the Geological Society of London. Twenty years after publishing a work on the purification of water in the River Thames, Bostock died of cholera.