This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Doctor John, born Jean Montanet and also known as Bayou John, worked as a root doctor and diviner in New Orleans earlier in the nineteenth century, active before Marie Laveau's own rise to prominence rather than as her contemporary or successor. He reported his own origin in Senegal, brought to New Orleans through the transatlantic slave trade, a self reported biography rather than one reconstructed later from outside records.
By Carolyn Morrow Long's account, Doctor John became among the most sought after and highly paid conjure practitioners in the city, building a clientele that crossed racial lines in a period when New Orleans society was otherwise organized around strict racial division. That a formerly enslaved man built a paid practice serving clients across those lines, rather than one confined to a single racial community, marks his career as a documented exception to the broader social pattern of the city he worked in.
Doctor John's practice predating Laveau's own public prominence places him earlier in the documented sequence of New Orleans conjure and Voodoo practitioners than the figure most popularly associated with the city's Voodoo history, an ordering the record supports even though his own name remains far less widely known today than hers.