James John Garth Wilkinson 1812 - 1899
James John Garth Wilkinson 1812 - 1899 was an 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.
James John Garth Wilkinson was also a friend of Alfred Russel Wallace.
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.
Homoeopathic 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 many friends and correspondents in the literary world included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Coventry Patmore, and George MacDonald. (James John Garth Wilkinson also knew William Michael Rossetti who was a close friend of homeopath John Epps and his wife Ellen Elliott Epps, having been introduced to them by William Michael Rossetti’s friend William Bell Scott).
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 homoeopathy, 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, Dr. 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 was a prolific writer.
Wilkinson discovered the remedy Hecla Lava on his many travels.
Wilkinson’s brother William 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 séance 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 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 Society, William 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 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 séances, 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 Forcible Introspection of Women for the Army and Navy by the Oligarchy (in suport of Josephine Elizabeth Butler’s work).
Sue :: Mar.20.2008 :: American History, British History :: 1 Comment »
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)