John Clinton Foshee was born in 1892 in West Chilton County, Alabama. He attended three years of Troy State Teachers College before deciding to attend Vanderbilt University School of Medicine to pursue his lifelong ambition to practice medicine. Foshee graduated from Vanderbilt in 1916 and accepted an internship at Butterworth Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan. For the remainder of his career, except for a period of two years during which he served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps for World War I, Foshee was an active member of Butterworth's staff. A pioneer in certain types of surgery, Foshee conducted experimental work which demonstrated that the fascia removed for use elsewhere in the body completely regenerates in a period of six months. He retired in 1967 and gifted his private medical surgical library and large collection of surgical instruments to Vanderbilt in 1969.