James John Garth Wilkinson 1812 – 1899
James John Garth Wilkinson 1812 – 1899 (photo from National Portrait Gallery) was a British orthodox doctor who converted to homeopathy on the advice of his friend Henry James Snr. Wilkinson graduated from the Hahnemann College in Philadelphia.
James John Garth Wilkinson was a surgeon at the Hahnemann Hospital at 39 Bloomsbury Square and a member of the Hahnemann Medical Society.
The Wedgwood family seen to have known James John Garth Wilkinson and his wife from at least 1866, when a Ms. Wedgwood and a Mrs. Garth Wilkinson were subscribers to the London Working Women’s College, and they both knew Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle. Emma Wedgwood and Mrs. Garth Wilkinson were sponsors of the National Anti-Vivisection Society in 1887, (Emma Wedgwood subsequently married Charles Darwin),
Francis Galton (cousin of the Darwin’s), having caught the fad for Spiritualism, arranged a séance in January 1874 at Erasmus Alvey Darwin’s house with those attending including Charles Darwin, Hensleigh Wedgwood and Thomas Henry Huxley. Charles Darwin’s son George Darwin hired the medium Charles Williams… (it is possible that Robert Masters Theobald, James John Garth Wilkinson, and George Wyld, were also present),
James John Garth Wilkinson was the homeopathic practitioner of John Winston Spencer Churchill 7th Duke of Marlborough, Lola Montez, Augustus de Morgan, Florence Theobald and Genevieve Ward, and he was a friend of William Blake, Robert Browning, James Compton Burnett, Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Clarke, Robert Thomas Cooper, Charles Dickens, Hugh Doherty, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Epps, James Anthony Froude, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Howitt, Henry James Snr Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, George MacDonald, Edward Maitland, the Oliphants, Robert Owen, Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore, Henry Crabb Robinson (who had met Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Masters Theobald, Charles Augustus Tulk, Mrs. Wagstaff, Alfred Russel Wallace and many others, and he attended Spiritualist meetings with Thomas Henry Huxley, Edward Bulwer Lytton, and John Tyndall.
With thanks to Francis Treuherz Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy: Vol. 77 No 4 1984. T7 The Origins of Kent’s Homeopathy:
The mid eighteenth century spiritual scientific works of Emanuel Swedenborg were translated by an English physician, John James Garth Wilkinson, in the 1840’s; he then became a homeopath. His translations were distributed through Henry James Snr to the homeopathic and Swedenborgian community of the USA….
Wilkinson went once to Iceland for a holiday and observed that the animals which fed in the pastures where the finer ashes of Mount Hecla fell, suffered from immense maxillary and other exostoses. Being an adherent of the scientific system of medicine founded for us by Samuel Hahnemann. He brought some Heclae Lava home with him (and James Epps made the remedy), and it has already been successfully used to cure affections similar to those which it is capable of causing. Heclae Lava has been shown to consist of silica, alumina, calcium, and magnesia with some ferric oxide. We are, therefore, not astonished that it can cause and cure exostosis….
Wilkinson was a prolific correspondent, writer, translator and homeopath…
He was a reluctant physician, following his father’s wishes. He qualified in 1834, when the work of a general practitioner was more that of a pharmacist than today, he had to recommend the copious consumption of physic, for it was from physic that he derived profit, but he was described as having a conscience, and a horror of promiscuous drugging.’
In the 1830’s, Wilkinson began to practice medicine, and having at first few patients he had time for other activities, notably translating Emanuel Swedenborg from the Latin.
In addition to obviously spiritual works like The Doctrine of Charity and Arcana Coelestia, he translated Regnum Animalis (The Animal Kingdom), the greatest and noblest work on Human Physiology which has ever appeared in the world, as Wilkinson described it in a letter to his fiancee. The work took four years to translate, from 1839 to 1843.
He wrote a biography of Emanuel Swedenborg published in 1849 (reissued in 1886). His work came to the attention of Henry James Snr, the editor of a Fourierist newspaper, The Harbinger of New York, a polished writer on theological and metaphysical subjects, father of William James and Henry James jnr. The two became intimate friends and regular, copious and affectionate correspondents.
It was through Henry James Snr that Wilkinson became acquainted with homeopathy. “You more than any other man led me into homeopathy,” wrote Wilkinson.
And it was through Henry James Snr that the numerous adherents of the New Church of Swedenborg in the United States became acquainted with the translation of Emanuel Swedenborg by Wilkinson.
Wilkinson went on to translate Oeconomia Regni Animalis (The Economy of the Animal Kingdom), with an analytical introduction separately published and among many other of Emanuel Swedenborg’s writings The Final Cause of Creation and The Intercourse between the Soul and the Body.
A preoccupation with spirituality and formative causation is disclosed, also found in the related ideas of Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy. Through his friendship with Henry James Snr and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the spread of his writings in the United states, Wilkinson has been viewed as a transcendentalist, and there was pressure on him to become a Fourierist.
Wilkinson was a friend of Hugh Doherty, chief disciple of Charles Fourier, in England, also a Swedenborgian. Among Wilkinson’s discoveries were two new nosodes, Glanderine and Farcine (also known as Hippozaeninum) and another two delightfully idiosyncratic works on the treatment of insanity with spiritualism, and painting with both hands, also known as stereoscope in art, or bimanual pictures.
In 1885 his services to homeopathy were recognised by his election to the Presidency of the Congress. Wilkinson began to lecture on physiology up and down England in Mechanics’ Institutes and the like; the line of thought he pursued led to his The Human Body and its Connection with Man in 1851.
During these years, from the time that Frederick Hervey Foster Quin introduced homeopathy to England in 1837, and when Henry James Snr drew it to his attention, Wilkinson underwent a gradual conversion – the word conversion with its connotations of religion is used by his biographer.
Up to 1850 he was a writer specialising upon theology from a Swedenborgian outlook, who practised physic for a maintenance; from that time forward he was a physician who found time to write upon the old subjects.’
From the publication of The Human Body in 1851, which was very widely read, his homeopathic practice grew and his writings took second place. He practised with great success in the Hampstead and St. John’s Wood area of London until his death in 1899….
Wilkinson studied homeopathy in the 1840’s, at a time when he was aware that homeopaths were, as his nephew Clement Wilkinson wrote, not only knaves or fools, lucky if they escaped condemnation under both headings but if a patient died under the care of one of their number, it was darkly hinted that the verdict of manslaughter should follow…
Having been reluctantly pushed into medicine by his father, he was at last discovering good reasons for remaining. He became enthusiastic, even a high dilutionist, using extremely attenuated remedies.
He wrote to Henry James Snr: “To what you say about small doses Homeopathic and large doses ditto, I have only one thing to answer, that I find my minute potions do their work, surely, swiftly and sweetly. If others And bigger things do the same, there is not any quarrel between us.
“But I do aver and maintain my own position. Everyday’s practice confirms me in the thought, if the right remedy is given, the quantity is a secondary affair: though also the quantity in that case by all the rules of causes, may be smaller than in the other case of inexacter skill”.
Wilkinson’s spirited defense of the essence of prescribing his high dilutions, for its style, as much as its content. The first paragraph deals with scientific exactness; the second with dilutions, and the “spiritual force;” the third paragraph quoted deals with “odium modicum.”
The main point of interest in Wilkinson’s adoption of homeopathy lies not only in his exploratory attitude and discovery of Heclae Lava, nor only in his place in the chain of the transmission of ideas across the Atlantic, but in the similarity which can plainly be seen in his homeopathic medical beliefs and his Swedenborgian theological creed.
The doctrine of a correspondence is the working key of the New Church attitude towards God and conduct, in medical matters the correspondence of drug effects and disease effects is the whole of homeopathic practice.’
The similarity was a striking one to Wilkinson, whose attachment to medicine had never been strongly marked. The convinced and enthusiastic followers of Emanuel Swedenborg found the system of Hahnemann a scientific statement of the doctrine of correspondence, in terms of medicine.
It was the doctrine of correspondences which made and kept Wilkinson a homeopath as a manifestation of the bond between his religious and medical creed, It crops up in his tract Emanuel Swedenborg among the Doctors written following an encounter with Robert Thomas Cooper, the friend of John Henry Clarke and James Compton Burnett.
Wilkinson had been invited to meet the Cooper Club of homeopathic physicians to discuss “Emanuel Swedenborg as a scientist,” restricting his conversation to medicine; the guests were informed that theological discussion is especially to be avoided’. There must have been polite resistance to spiritualism.
Since Wilkinson could not exclude theology from the discussion, he declined the invitation to the meeting and politely contributed a paper instead, combining his views without offending hospitality. He called it Emanuel Swedenborg among the Doctors. ….
Emanuel Swedenborg’s ideas of 1734 to 1744 were buried in Latin for a century until Wilkinson’s translations made their timely arrival, on the eastern seaboard of America….
James John Garth Wilkinson was also inspired by Emanuel Swedenborg, to the elucidation of whose writings he devoted much of his life.
James John Garth Wilkinson’s brother William M Wilkinson was an officer at the Swedenborgian Society and a spiritualist). Between 1840 and 1850 he edited Swedenborg’s treatises on The Doctrine of Charity, The Animal Kingdom, Outlines of a Philosophic Argument on the Infinite, and Hieroglyphic Key to Natural and Spiritual Mysteries.
Wilkinson’s preliminary discourses to these translations and his criticisms of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s comments on Swedenborg displayed an aptitude not only for mystical research, but also for original philosophic debate.
The vigour of his thought won admiration from Henry James Snr and from Ralph Waldo Emerson, through whom he met Thomas Carlyle and James Anthony Froude; and his speculation further attracted Alfred Lord Tennyson, the Oliphants and Edward Maitland.
He wrote an able sketch of Swedenborg for the Penny Cyclopaedia, and a standard biography, Emanuel Swedenborg (1849); but these were not his only interests.
He was a traveller, a linguist, well versed in Scandinavian literature and philology, the author of mystical poems entitled Improvisations from the Spirit (1857), a social and medical reformer, a convinced opponent of vivisection and also of vaccination. He is commemorated by a bust and portrait in the rooms of the Swedenborgian Society in Bloomsbury Street, London.
Homeopathic physician, translator and biographer of Swedenborg and a writer on a variety of religious, medical and social topics. He edited the first letter press edition of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.
His greatest friend was the American Swedenborgian thinker Henry James Snr, who named his third son Garth Wilkinson James in his honour.
An early practitioner of homeopathy, he saw Hahnemann’s system as a scientific application of Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences.
Henry James Snr financed Wilkinson’s work:
Henry James Snr began to finance Wilkinson’s translations of Swedenborg, which were distributed by Otis Clapp in Boston. As a result of this relationship, Ralph Waldo Emerson derived much of his knowledge of Swedenborg in the 1840s from Wilkinson and Henry James Snr. Ralph Waldo Emerson lectured on Swedenborg for several years and finally published his lecture as “Swedenborg the Mystic” in Representative Men.
Wilkinson’s methods for the homeopathic treatment of insanity were linked to a stream of consciousness technique he had developed for the speaking, writing, and drawing of literary subjects; and we know that Wilkinson’s unpublished manuscript on a case of hysterical fasting in a young girl was one of the most highly prized pieces in William James’s personal library.
Wilkinson and William James also shared a mutual contempt for the arrogance of orthodox medical men concerning their claim to have superior ability over the mental healers in caring for the mentally ill….
This variation on Swedenborg’s doctrine of use, inherited through Henry James Snr, modified by Wilkinson’s views on mental healing, and interpreted through Peirce’s philosophy, was to have a profound effect on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century development of a uniquely American functional psychology.
Wilkinson was a fighter for homeopathy. According to Peter Morrell:
I therefore hope that the following quote from an article about the Swedenborgian homeopath, John James Garth Wilkinson by Logie Barrow, will convey some of the tone of that ‘golden age of medical liberalism’ which were the 1850s, and serve, ever so slightly perhaps, to illuminate our darkness:
‘…the ‘bible of nature’ would be opened to the public as well as to the professions; and the professions themselves must be content to…stand…in a clear…connection with the common sense of mankind.’
Addressing a congress of British homeopathic practitioners during the mid 1850s, Wilkinson thundered that, even were they to become
‘the recognised Drug medicine of tomorrow, it could never set up into the old benches which its predecessor had occupied… the homeopaths would have to smash the current institutional structure of medicine.’
Anything less and they would find themselves at the apex of what he called ‘a second medical despotism’. Around the 1850s many plebeian practitioners [most consistently the Botanists] seem to have shared Wilkinson’s confidence that they were about to lay siege to orthodoxy.’
Wilkinson discovered the remedy Hecla Lava on his many travels. In 1868, he travelled to Iceland and became very interested in Icelandic Sagas. In 1869, he travelled to America. Wilkinson’s brother William M Wilkinson, was also active in Swedenborgianism and in Spiritualism:
In 1855 Daniel Douglas Home came to England and held a séance at the London home of Dr Garth Wilkinson, homeopathic physician, friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James Snr, translator of Swedenborg and a well-known member of this Society.
Wilkinson was sufficiently impressed by Daniel Douglas Home’s performance to write a detailed account, which was published in a daily newspaper, The Morning Advertiser.
He reported that during the seance a large hand appeared with fingers extended. Daniel Douglas Home recoiled from it, saying: ‘O! keep me from that hand! It is so cold! Do not let it touch me’. The hand disappeared and was replaced almost immediately by a hand wearing a glove.
Garth’s brother, the solicitor William M Wilkinson (at that time Secretary of the Swedenborg Society) was even more involved with spiritualism. He edited the Spiritual Magazine for a number of years and actually ‘ghosted’ the bulk of Daniel Douglas Home’s memoirs, Incidents in My Life, published in 1863, and wrote a preface to the second edition published the following year.
As Secretary of the Swedenborgian Society, William M Wilkinson supported the efforts of the agent and manager William White to introduce spiritualist literature into the Society’s shop (then at 1 Bloomsbury Street), but left office when the Society’s committee took legal proceedings to evict William White from the building.
For Garth Wilkinson, the interest in spiritualist manifestations appears to have been a passing phase. Twenty years later he made plain his final attitude:
‘I do not deny, but prize, in their place, spontaneous motions of the spiritual world upon and in the natural world… . On the other hand, solicited intercourse with the spiritual world is, to me, a mistake, and with my convictions, it would be a sin to take part in seances, or any other means, in such solicitation’.
That seems to me to be a good summary of the Swedenborgian position with regard to spiritualism.
James John Garth Wilkinson wrote The Development of Both Hands, Improvisations of the Spirit, The Forcible Introspection of Women for the Army and Navy by the Oligarchy (in suport of Josephine Elizabeth Butler’s work). Wilkinson was a prolific writer. See James John Garth Wilkinson: a memoir of his life by Clement John Wilkinson,
Of interest:
Clement Wilkinson, nephew of James John Garth Wilkinson, was on the Medical Board of the Hahnemann Hospital at 39 Bloomsbury Square.
James John Garth Wilkinson was the son of a judge, born in Durham, he had three daughters and one son.
Emma married Hermann Pertz, Florence married St. John Attwood Mathers, and Mary married Francis Claughton Mathews. Florence and Mary had no children, but Florence had a wide social circle that included Anthony Wedgwood Benn, Stanley Owen Buckmaster, Israel Gollancz, Etheldreda Hull, and Henry James.
Emma Marsh Wilkinson had two daughters and two sons, and James John Garth Wilkinson’s great grand daughter was Cecilia Helena Payne Gaposchkin, the first astronomer to show that the Sun is mainly composed of hydrogen, contradicting accepted wisdom at the time.
Cecilia Helena Payne Gaposchkin was also related to Charles Lyell through her Aunt Katherine Lyell, who was Charles Lyell’s sister in law. Anthony Wedgwood Benn was a close friend of Florence Wilkinson, the daughter of James John Garth Wilkinson.
(Anthony Wedgwood Benn received homeopathic treatment from Sheila Hubacher, his researcher for most of the 1990s, who was a homeopathic practitioner).
John Wilkinson and James Wilkinson were homeopathic Veterinary Surgeons in 1868, and colleagues of William C Lord. Both James Wilkinson and John Wilkinson are recorded on the India Office and Burma Office list in 1823.
James Wilkinson 1800? – 1879? MRCVS, ?brother of John Wilkinson Veterinary Surgeon, was an orthodox Veterinary Surgeon who converted to homeopathy. James Wilkinson practiced at 60 Miles Street, Toxteth Park, Liverpool, and in Forfarshire, Scotland,
John Wilkinson 1799? – 1871 MRCVS, was an orthodox Veterinary Surgeon of the 2nd Regiment of the Lifeguards, Principlal Veterinary Surgeon at Woolwich Barracks, Royal Army Veterinary Corps 1854, Veterinary Surgeon to the Duke of Cambridge’s Own 17th Lancers (most famous for its participation in the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War), who converted to homeopathy.
In 1867, John Wilkinson was an activist against vivisection,and he was kept fully appraised of the homeopathic treatment of epidemics in horses by his colleague of William C Lord. John Wilkinson also practiced at Aigburth Road, Liverpool,
John Gardner Wilkinson 1797 – 1875, the “the Father of British Egyptology”, made a study of homeopathy.
William M Wilkinson Solicitor, brother of James John Garth Wilkinson, was a was an officer at the Swedenborgian Society and a spiritualist), and a colleague of Thomas Shorter, his co-editor of The Spiritual Magazine:
Toward the end of 1860 The Spiritual Magazine was founded by William M Wilkinson (brother of James John Garth Wilkinson) and became the leading organ. It ran until 1875. Thomas Shorter and William M Wilkinson were the editors for the greater part of its existence, and William Howitt was the chief contributor.
William M Wilkinson…. actually ‘ghosted’ the bulk of Daniel Douglas Home’s memoirs, Incidents in My Life, published in 1863 and wrote a preface to the second edition published the following year.
As Secretary of the Swedenborgian Society, William M Wilkinson supported the efforts of the agent and manager William White to introduce spiritualist literature into the Society’s shop (then at 1 Bloomsbury Street), but left office when the Society’s committee took legal proceedings to evict William White from the building.
Sue :: Mar.20.2008 :: British History :: 2 Comments »
This is another love letter to you, Sue, because I love the work that you are doing.
Below is another excerpt from my book, “The Homeopathic Revolution.” This excerpt is from my chapter on “Clergy and Spiritual Leaders” which includes some information about Swedenborg, where I reference a great, even amazing, quote about Wilkinson from Emerson…
John James Garth Wilkinson, MD (1812–1899), a homeopathic physician who trained at the Hahnemann Medical College of Philadelphia, was introduced to the work of Swedenborg by his friend Henry James, Sr., the influential publisher of a newspaper of utopian ideas and father of the American writers William James and Henry James, Jr. Wilkinson, who was also a widely knowledgeable scholar, began translating Swedenborg’s work (which Henry James, Sr. financed), and Wilkinson’s work is known to have helped create the Swedenborg movement (Treuherz, 1984).
Emerson lectured on Swedenborg for several years, and in 1850 he published his lecture “Swedenborg the Mystic” in Representative Men, which also included biographies of Plato, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe. In another book, Emerson eloquently wrote:
“Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg, the annotator of Fourier [the French utopianist], and the champion of Hahnemann, has brought to metaphysics and to physiology a native vigor, with a catholic perception of relations, equal to the highest attempts, and a rhetoric like the armory of the invincible knights of old. There is in the action of his mind a long Atlantic roll not known except in deepest waters, and only lacking what ought to accompany such powers, a manifest centrality. If his mind does not rest in immovable biases, perhaps the orbit is larger, and the return is not yet: but a master should inspire a confidence that he will adhere to his convictions, and give his present studies always the same high place.” (Emerson, 1856)
Later, Emerson wrote that Swedenborg “saw and showed the connections between nature and the affections of the soul. He pierced the emblematic or spiritual character of the visible, audible, tangible world. … The importance of the Swedenborgian attraction lay in its thrust … towards an ordered and predictable universe, towards a synthesis of matter and spirit” (Emerson, 1903, 113)
You just posted a new photo of Wilkinson, and I again tip my hat to you for uncovering another treasure.
Today, in the USA, the most famous doctor is Mehmet Oz, MD, a cardiovascular surgeon who has held a long-term interest in natural and alternative medicine and who ultimately advocates for “integrative health care.” He has been one of Oprah Winfrey’s most popular guests, and his appearances on her tv show led to his own tv show which is shown 5 times a week and is increasingly popular, called “The Dr. Oz Show.”
Readers will be intrigued to know that he and his family are Swedenborgians. The history of their involvement stems from Mehmet’s wife (Lisa) and her parents. Lisa’s father, Jerry Lemole, is a cardiothoracic surgeon, and her mother, Emily Jane, got her masters degree in religion (and she did her thesis on Swedenborg).
It is intriguing to note that when Lisa and Mehmet were courting, she told Mehmet about her interest (even passion) for Swedenborg, and she told him about many of the most famous people over the past several hundred years who have also been appreciators of Swedenborg (just as Sue Young and I have sought to do with our writings on homeopathy and its many famous and highly respected advocates).
Hopefully, the masses (or at least a significant minority) of modern-day people will one day soon wake up to the wisdom that presently exists in homeopathy and in Swedenborgian thought and practice…one day VERY soon.