James Westwood Wallace (ca. 1769-1838), a member of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, lived in Warrenton, Fauquier County, Virginia. TJ’s first notice of Wallace came in 1803, when the young doctor was recommended for a post in New Orleans. The above letter initiated a correspondence that lasted until the president’s death. John Quincy Adams, who knew the doctor in later years, wrote that he was “an eccentric personage” who could dominate a conversation and had an enthusiasm for snakes. Wallace’s experiments on the medicinal benefits of rattlesnake venom, using himself as subject, were reported in medical journals of the time (James Westwood Wallace, An Inaugural Physiological Dissertation on the Catamenia: To Which Are Subjoined, Observations on Amenorrhea [Philadelphia, 1793]; Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848, 12 vols. [Philadelphia, 1874-77], 7:41-2; British Journal of Homoeopathy, 163 [1883], 32; Daily National Intelligencer, 5 Sep. 1838; Vol. 41:304-5; Vol. 42:452-3).