Sue Young Homeopathy

The Drysdale family name is a sept of the Black and Red Douglas Clan, originating in Scotland in the mists of antiquity. There are branches of this family all over the World.

The 19th Century in England finds several members of this family practicing as homeopaths and as orthodox physicians amidst the social intelligentsia of their day.

Alfred E Drysdale 1847 - 1881 died in Cannes at the early age of 34. Alfred E Drsydale lived and practiced as a homeopath in Cannes.

Alfred Drysdale proved Pyrogen in 1875 and he was the son of the Lord Provost of Edinburgh.

Charles Robert Drysdale 1829 - 1907 was the younger brother of John James Drysdale and he was a physician with homeopathic sympathies who worked at the Farrington Dispensary and who was the Senior Physician at the Metropolitan Free Hospital in London and the President of the Malthusian League, the first organization in England dedicated to advocating the practice of birth control.

Charles Robert Drysdale was the editor of The Malthusian and a prodigeous author.

The first organization in England dedicated to advocating the practice of birth control was the Malthusian League. The Malthusian documents the questions of population, wage issues, poverty, prostitution. It also provides information on birth control, marriage, the family, poverty, prostitution, racial theories, and the whole area of women and social change.

Charles Robert Drysdale was a friend of Charles Darwin.

Charles Robert Drysdale was a witness at Annie Besant’s trial, and the Malthusian League originated in July 1877 when Annie Besant suggested the idea to members of the London Dialectical Society and the defense committee organized to defend her and Charles Bradlaugh in the trial for publishing Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy.

Charles Vickery Drysdale 1874-1961 was the son of Charles Robert Drysdale and his wife Alice. He also wrote many books, on Thomas Malthus and many other subjects.

Charles Vickery Drysdale was educated at Finsbury Technical College and Central Technical College, South Kensington. He became the Associate Head of the Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics Department at the Northampton Institute 1896-1910.

After a brief period as a partner in the firm of H. Tinsley and Co from 1916 to 1919, he joined the Admiralty Experimental Station at Harwich Parkeston Quay in 1918. From there he went on to become Scientific Director at the Admiralty Experimental Station, Shandon, 1919-1921, Superintendent at the Admiralty Research Laboratory, Teddington, 1921-1929 and Director of Scientific Research at The Admiralty 1929-1934. From 1934 onwards he was a member of the Safety in Mines Research Board.

This collection at the London School of Economics focuses on Drysdale’s interests in population and birth control. He was Honorary Secretary of the Malthusian League and Editor of ‘The Malthusian’, 1907-1916, and president of the Neo-Malthusian Conferences in London 1921 and New York 1925. He was the author of a number of works on population control and eugenics, and was also the first witness to be called before the National Birth-Rate Commission in 1913. He married Bessie Ingman Edwards in 1898.

Charles Vickery Drysdale took over as Malthusian League Secretary on his father’s death, and edited the Journal until 1921. He expaned the Malthusian League’s activities to include publishing and promoting contraception, and he opened birth control clinics.

Together with his wife Bessie Ingham Drysdale 1871-1950, (she was a teacher and suffragist), they assisted Margaret Higgins Sanger in her important work.

George Robert Drysdale 1825-1904 elder brother of Charles Robert Drysdale and John James Drysdale who also became a doctor, and who was also a member of the Malthusian League.

George Drysdale wrote The Elements of Social Science, which was a publishing sensation in its day, and went through 35 editions between 1855 and 1905 and sold 80,000 copies. It was originally called Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion and published by Edward Truelove of 240 Strand.

In the The Elements of Social Science, George Drysdale describes himself as ‘a student of medicine’, and the book is dedicated to ‘the poor and suffering’. The book was controversial in its day, discussing in a frank and unsensational manner the various methods of contraception known to British and European doctors, such that the poor could be taught how to limit their families.

John Chapman encouraged discussion of this book in the Westminster Review.

The book hovered just the other side of complete respectability. The British Library’s copies of the editions in 1872, 1875, 1886 are ‘destroyed’. The British Library copy of 1867 is listed as ‘missing’.

John James Drysdale MD Edin. 1816 - 1890 elder brother of Charles Robert Drysdale and the editor of the British Journal of Homeopathy.

John James Drysdale was a student of James Young Simpson in Edinburgh, alongside Thomas Skinner, and he also knew William Henderson.

The Drysdales were friends of Catharine Crowe and familiar with the social circle of the day which included Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin. John Chapman who edited the Westminster Review was a homeopathic colleague.

In 1841, a Dr. (John?) Chapman and John James Drysdale opened the Liverpool Homeopathic Dispensary at 14 Benson Street.

John James Drysdale was a friend of Charles Darwin, who was also close to John Drysdale’s mother *Lady Elizabeth Drysdale. Charles Darwin describes Elizabeth Drysdale and her son in law Edward Wickstead Lane as “… some of the nicest people I have ever met“.

*Elizabeth Drysdale was the wife of William Drysdale (1781–1847) and the mother in law of the hydropathic specialist Edward Wickstead Lane whose establishment at Moor Park Charles Darwin visited.

John James Drysdale was a constant visitor at Moor Park who ‘made his brother in law’s home his own’ and came often with his younger brother Charles Robert Drysdale.

Charles Darwin knew **Drysdale well enough to know his views on various scientific and social subjects well enough to be able to recommend him to Herbert Spencer as a potential subscriber to the ‘System of Synthetic Philosophy‘. (**Though Darwin did know John James Drysdale at Moor Park, he would also have met his brother Charles Robert Drysdale and his elder brother, ***George Robert Drysdale, (also a medical student) (the authors of The Elements of Social Science; or, Physical, Sexual, and Natural Religion) and several other family members so it is not completely clear which Drysdale he actually mentioned to Herbert Spencer).

Elizabeth Drysdale was the daughter of John Pew of Hilltown, Kirkudbrightshire. Married William Copland of Colliston, Dumfries; widowed, 1808. Married Sir William Drysdale 1781–1847, for many years treasurer of the city of Edinburgh.

*Elizabeth Drysdale apparently had several stepchildren, as William had five children by two previous wives before their marriage.

John James Drysdale was then in his late fifties, had qualified at Edinburgh and spent several years in the great continental medical schools before settling in Liverpool, where his successes (using homeopathy) in the cholera epidemic of 1849 had so ‘roused the envy of his allopathic colleagues’ that he was forthwith ‘expelled from the Liverpool Medical Institute‘.

John James Drysdale studied under Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Fleischman in Vienna with John Rutherford Russell.

John James Drysdale was a member of the Liverpool Homeopathic Society.

The Liverpool Homeopathic Dispensary had been a Free Medical Charity from at least 1842 and consisted of the following dispensaries. The South End Homeopathic Dispensary was established in 1841 at 41 Frederick Street by Dr Drysdale, later moving to a house in Benson Street, then to 2 Harford Street. Later, the Dispensary moved to a building in Hardman Street, erected by public subscription in 1860, and transferred to Hope Street when the Hahnemann Hospital was built in 1887… Liverpool branch of the British Homeopathic Society…

The first meeting was held in May 1857. The original name proposed for the society was ‘The Homeopathic Medico-Chirurigal Society of Liverpool’. There were to be quarterly meetings with members voted by ballot. At the meeting of 5th of December 1860, it was proposed to elect an annual president - the first, elected 6th February 1861 was Dr Drysdale, with Dr. Moore as vice president.

It was decided to hold monthly meetings at the dispensary in Hardman Street. In April 1858, it was renamed ‘The Society for the Proving of Medicines’. In April 1859 the committee of the Liverpool Homoeopathic Dispensary requested that the Honorary Medical Officers of the Society would attend the poor there. An agreement was formed to attend one morning per week. Office Bearers of the Society also formed a Medical Board for the Dispensary to direct treatment there.

John James Drysdale trained James Compton Burnett and John Henry Clarke. John James Drysdale, John Rutherford Russell were fellow students with Robert Ellis Dudgeon in Vienna. The three also edited the British Journal of Homeopathy from 1846-84 after which it ceased.

Richard Hughes wrote, in A Manual of Pharmacodynamics:

“Dr. Drysdale also has laid much stress on what he calls “specificity of seat,” connecting it with the special irritability displayed by the various parts for their natural stimuli and for causes of disease, and extending it to the minutest localities or nerve-branches which have anything independent and special about them.”

John James Drysdale was the first homeopath to propose the remedy Kali bichromicum in 1846 and pyrogen in 1880. He was also working with Tuberculinum ten years before Robert Koch.

John James Drysdale in his Germ Theories of Infectious Disease in 1878, identified at least ten types of ‘infectious miasms’: ‘chemical ferments’, ‘organised ferments’, morphologically specific parasites, physiologically specific parasites, saprophytes, animal graft-germs, vegetable graft-germs and chemical septic products (liquid or gaseous).

Alfred E Drysdale wrote the History of Homoeopathy: Its Origin, Its Conflicts… with Wilhelm Ameke and Robert Ellis Dudgeon, and he translated A History of Homeopathy by Wilhelm Ameke.

Charles Robert Drysdale wrote The Nature and treatment of syphilis and the other so-called ‘contagious …, On the Treatment of Syphilis and Other Diseases Without Mercury, Medical Opinions on the Population Question, Clerical Opinions on the Population Question, The Principle of Population, The Population Question According to T. R. Malthus and J. S. Mill: Giving … , Overpopulation Considered as a Prominent Cause of Misery and Early Death, Prostitution Medically Considered: With Some of Its Social Aspects, Report of the Committee for the Prevention of Venereal Diseases, The Elements of Social Science; Or Physical, Sexual, and Natural Religion with George Robert Drysdale, The Life and Writings of Thomas R. Malthus, Medicine as a profession for women, Tobacco and the diseases it produces, The Length of Life of Total Abstainers and Moderate Drinkers Compared, Alcohol and public health, The Cause of Poverty: A Paper Read at the National Liberal Club, Debate on Infanticide, in the Harveian Medical Society of London … , On Cholera; Its Nature and Treatment, On Animal Vaccination and the Origin of Vaccine, For and Against Animal Vaccination.

George Robert Drysdale wrote The Elements of Social Science.

John James Drysdale wrote the Organon of the Rational Art of Healing with Charles Edwin Wheeler, Materia medica: Physiological and Applied, The Hahnemann Materia Medica with Robert Ellis Dudgeon and others, The Chief Task of Homeopathy is the Perfecting of the Materia Medica, An Introduction to the Study of Homoeopathy… with John Rutherford Russell, Elements of General Pathology with John Fletcher and John Rutherford Russell, Address on Modern Medicine and Homeopathy at the Congress of Homeopathic Medical Practitioners in 1870, and he edited The British and Foreign Homœopathic Medical Directory and Record.

Of interest:

Why the Ripper stopped killing after November 9th, 1888, has always been one of the central mysteries of the Ripper question. With James Maybrick there is a good explanation. On November 19th, Maybrick changed doctors, consulting Dr. J. Drysdale, who treated him with homeopathic remedies. Drysdale treated James Maybrick five more times before his death, apparently with a gradual improvement. (Drysdale gave testimony under oath at Mrs. Maybrick’s trial). It is clear from the diary that James Maybrick slowly but surely lost interest in further killings, feeling considerable remorse just before his death.

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Sue :: Jul.29.2008 :: British History :: 2 Comments »

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