SHECUT, John Linnaeus Edward Whitridge, author, born in Beaufort, South Carolina, 4 December, 1770; died in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1836. He was graduated in medicine at Philadelphia in 1791, and soon afterward began practice in Charleston, where he spent the remainder of his life. He was actively concerned in founding the South Carolina homespun society, the first cotton-factory in the state, and in 1813 organized the Antiquarian society of Charleston, now the Literary and philosophical society of South Carolina. Dr. Shecut maintained that a predisposing cause of yellow fever was the derangement of the atmosphere consequent upon its being deprived of its due proportion of electricity, and he is said to have been the first physician in Charleston to apply electricity in the treatment of this disease. He was the author of " Flora Caroliniensis, a Historical, Medical, and Economical Display of the Vegetable Kingdom " (2 vols., Charleston, 1806); " An Essay on the Yellow Fever of 1817" (1817) ; "An Inquiry into tile Properties and Powers of the Electric Fluid, and its Artificial Application to Medical Uses " (1818) ; "Shecut's Medical and Philosophical Essays" (1819): " Elements of Natural Philosophy" (1826); and "A New Theory of the Earth " (1826).