John Ware was born on December 19, 1795 in Hingham, Massachussets. His father, Rev. Henry Ware, 1764-1845, was a minister and Hollis Professor of Theology at Harvard College; his mother was Mary, daughter of Rev. Jonas Clark of Lexington, Massachussets, and granddaughter of the Rev. Thomas Hancock, also of Lexington. Two of Ware's brothers became ministers, Henry and William, while another brother, Charles, was a physician.
John entered Harvard College at the age of thirteen and was graduated in 1813. Three years later he received the degree of M. D. from the Harvard Medical School.
In 1814 began practice in Boston. He was poor, patients were few, and he turned his hand to other things besides medicine. For ten years he practised dentistry, kept school, took private scholars into his home, wrote for magazines, published a novel, gave popular lectures, and edited medical publications. The novel, Charles Ashton (1823), was issued anonymously; to the North American Review he contributed a poem (November 1817), a story (July 1818), and reviews of medical and scientific books. From 1823 to 1826, with John W. Webster and Daniel Treadwell, he issued the short-lived Boston Journal of Philosophy and the Arts, and in 1828, with Walter Channing, edited the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. During the period before recognition came to him as a teacher of medicine, he edited William Smellie's Philosophy of Natural History (1824) and William Paley's Natural Theology (1829). His chief medical contribution was an essay, Remarks on the History and Treatment of Delirium Tremens (1831), the result of the observations of nearly one hundred cases seen in the course of fourteen years. It was the first important work on the subject in America and ranks with Thomas Sutton's classic account of the same disease published in England in 1813. James Jackson, then Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physic at the Harvard Medical School, was the first to recognize Ware's worth as a teacher. He was put upon the staff of the school in 1832 as Jackson's associate, and when Jackson resigned in 1836 Ware succeeded him as Hersey Professor. At the school and the Massachusetts General Hospital Ware did his best work, a worthy successor to Jackson although a man of lesser caliber. In 1847 he published Discourses on Medical Education and on the Medical Profession, in which he made a strong appeal for the highest standards of medical education in an effort to combat irregular practitioners. He became interested, also, in the campaign for moral improvement and wrote Hints to Young Men (1850), which passed through many subsequent editions. His more strictly scientific papers include "Contributions to the History and Diagnosis of Croup" (New England Quarterly Journal of Medicine and Surgery, October 1842), and On Hemoptysis as a Symptom (1860). The former was based on observation of 131 cases, which he divided into classes, separating membranous croup or diphtheria from the others. He gave an excellent clinical description of this disease, but the paper was most valuable because of his effort to overcome the extreme type of treatment used at the time by other physicians. His work on hemoptysis, based on 386 cases observed over a period of forty years, pointed out the importance of this symptom in the early diagnosis of phthisis. His health failed some years before his death, but he lived to complete his Philosophy of Natural History (1860). The closing days of his life were saddened by the death of his son, Maj. Robert Ware, killed in battle in 1864.
He was one of the founders of the Boston Society for Medical Improvement in 1839 and served as president of the Massachusetts Medical Society from 1848 to 1852. The lecture hall in the Boston Medical Library serves as a memorial to him. It contains his portrait as well as a bust by Bela Pratt. Ware's chief literary effort was Memoir of the Life of Henry Ware, Jr. (1846).
The death of Ware and his son in the same year was gracefully memorialized by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his poem, "In Memory of John and Robert Ware. "
He was married, first, April 22, 1822, to Helen, daughter of Levi and Desire Thaxter Lincoln of Hingham. She died in 1858, having borne him eight children. His second wife, Mary Green Chandler, of Petersham, Massachussets, whom he married Feburary 25, 1862, was an author.
