John Page
John Page (1696-1779), later MP for Chichester and secretary of the Treasury, first served Ward while Ward was exiled in France: near the close of Ward’s French residence, Ward incurred the authorities’ displeasure, and Page’s “good offices” spared him imprisonment in the Bastille. Ward returned the favor at his death: the 1899 Dictionary of National Biography records that “The secrets of his medicines were bequeathed to John Page,” who published the receipts and arranged that the profits from the sale of the medicines should be divided between the Asylum for Female Orphans and the Magdalen, placing the arrangement under the charge of the magistrate Sir John Fielding. Page’s post-mortem charitable redirection of the proceeds does not establish that Ward himself treated his own decades of personal earnings from the medicine the same way.