The Epps Family and Homeopathy
The Epps family were in every sense a phenomenal homeopathic family, comprising several homeopathic physicians and pharmacists. Their main pharmacy was established in 1839 at Jermyn Street, SW1.
The Epps family was an English family, well known in commerce and medicine. In the second half of the 18th century they had been settled near Ashford, Kent, for some generations, claiming descent from an equerry of Charles II, but were reduced in circumstances, when John Epps rose to prosperity as a provision merchant in London, and restored the family fortunes.
He had four sons, of whom John Epps, George Napoleon Epps, and James Epps were notable men of their day, the two former were prominent doctors who were ardent converts to homoeopathy, and James was a homoeopathic chemist and the founder of the great cocoa business associated with his name.
Among George Napoleon Epps’s children were Washington Epps, a well known homoeopath, Laura Theresa, Lady Alma-Tadema, and Mrs. Edmund Gosse.
Ellen Elliott Epps 1808-1876 wife of John Epps Writer on health issues.
Ellen Elliott Epps made a major contribution to the homoeopathic movement by translating the works of the founder of homeopathic theory, Samuel Hahnemann… and published in a book “Progress of Homeopathy in 1855
Ellen Elliott Epps was a school friend of William Bell Scott’s wife. William Bell Scott introduced the Epps family to William Michael Rossetti. Christina Rossetti also became a friend to the Epps family. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a close friend of homeopath James John Garth Wilkinson, and Giuseppe Mazzini introduced homeopath John Epps and his wife Ellen Epps to the Rossetti’s.
Ellen (Nellie) Epps 1850-1929 was the daughter of George Napoleon Epps, and she married Edmund William Gosse. Nellie was also a painter and a writer.
George Napoleon Epps 1815-74 brother ?or half brother of John Epps and father of Washington Epps, Laura Theresa, Lady Alma-Tadema, and Ellen Nellie Epps Gosse.
George Napoleon Epps homeopathic practitioner, Surgeon to the homeopathic hospital at 17 Hanover Square, London, 1845
George Napoleon Epps is buried at the Kensal Green Cemetery.
James Epps (1821-1907) a homeopathic chemist in the Euston Road, at 112 Great Russell Street, 82 Old Bond Street and in Piccadilly, was the founder of the great cocoa business associated with his name.
James Epps provided foodstuffs for the Athenaeum Club, who did not distinguish themselves when they prevented homeopath Frederick Hervey Foster Quin from becoming a member, but were quite happy to munch on ‘homeopathic confectionaries’!
James Epps homeopathic pharmacy supplied remedies to Samuel Brooking for his trip to India:
Surgeon Samuel Brooking, a retired Medical Officer had the courage and conviction to establish a Homeopathic Hospital at Tanjore, in South India, in 1847…
James Epps also provided homeopathic remedies for James Manby Gully.
John Epps 1805-1869 was an orthodox physician who converted to homeopathy in 1838 and is best known as a homoeopathic physician, although his influence was wider reaching being involved, as he was, in ‘the advancement of commercial, political or religious freedom’.
As an allopath, John Epps had been a frequent contributor to The Lancet . In 1843 his homeopathically treated case of haematemesis was published in The Lancet provoking “an avalanche of letters” which led to the rejection of further homeopathic cases.
By the 1850s, John Epps was the leading practitioner of homeopathy in London. He practiced at 89 Great Russell Street and a frequent contributor to the British Journal of Homeopathy, and he contributed cases to The Journal of Health and Disease.
The Times designated John Epps as the Physician in General to the British Constitution.
Tait’s Edinburgh magazine, on reviewing his book Constipation, its cause and cure, commented that ‘there are some books not even critics criticise; this book is one of them…’ Tait’s Edinburgh magazine was equally full of praise for John Epps’s book Homeopathy and its Principles Explained…
John Epps successfully treated spinal deformity and worked in Edward Harrison’s Spinal Unit:
All of Epps and Harrison’s descriptions refer to patients treated at home, and there is no record of their work at the institute.
John Epps formed the British Homeopathic Association, based upon his democratic values and encouraging lay and domestic healing, particularly attracting middle-class mothers.
John Epps was a Swedenborgian and he was active in the Anti Corn Law League, his convictions honed by a ‘lifetime’s pilgramage‘ through several sects (active at this time)… and George Wilson was his patient…
John Epps was a radical dissenter. One of the very few nineteenth century homeopaths who really saw medicine as a tool of liberation for the poor and lower classes, and who was a compassionate religious non-conformist….
Charles Darwin… was not alone in extending the ethical net from oppressed men to the forlorn brutes. The Quaker doctor John Epps, London phrenologist, homeopath and disestablishment campaigner, had ‘come to consider all creatures as being equally important in the scale of creation as myself; to regard the poor Indian slave as my brother.’
… ‘the whole creation travaileth and groaneth’. This was John Epps’s reading of St Paul. He was adamant that ‘animals enjoy mind, and with it personality, desires and pain’
… John Epps ‘was of short stature and sturdy frame, and had a beaming, self-confident expression. He was regarded by many of the working classes as a prophet in medicine…
he impressed many people with… his great earnestness… and his evident desire to benefit his fellow creatures. He had a great command of words, a fine sonorous voice, and an animated manner. His philanthropic efforts and personal acts of kindness were numberless.’
He was also ‘an ardent champion of liberal causes at home and of oppressed nationalities abroad.’ Which is I suppose a very polite way of saying he was also well connected with many other rebels of the day.
These include Guiseppe Garibaldi the Italian patriot; Lajos Kossuth the Hungarian revolutionary who stayed in London for a time in the 1850s where he ‘was received with respect and sympathy’; and Giuseppe Mazzini, another important Italian patriot who ‘found refuge in London in 1837′. No doubt at Dr Epps’s house.
Giuseppe Mazzini also stayed with John Chapman at 142 Strand.
John Epps trained James Chalmers in medicine:
After spending eight months working with people in the worst slums of Glasgow, James Chalmers studied for two years in Cheshunt College, then stayed one year at Highgate where he took special studies, including elementary medicine in Dr. Epps’ Homeopathic Hospital.
John Epps founded the Westminster Dispensary in 1835.
In 1845, the British Homeopathic Association was formed with Marmaduke Blake Sampson, Richard Walter Heurtley and John Epps.
John Epps London, MD Edinburgh 1827, born 15-2-1805 Ashford, Kent, died 12-2-1869 London [from Diary of the Late John Epps]; formerly a Lecturer in Materia Medica and Botany at the Hunterian School of Medicine, London, John Epps was a political, religious and medical radical, who was loosely associated with Frederick Hervey Foster Quin, and more closely with Paul Francois Curie, Harris P Dunsford, Highley, the co-founders of the radical and breakaway British Homeopathic Association, in direct opposition to the British Homeopathic Society.
John Epps was a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, lecturer on Materia Medica and Chemistry, Director of the Royal Jennerian and London Vaccine Institutions and a member of the Committee of the Westminster Medical Society.
Charlotte Bronte’s publisher Smith, Elder and Co in Cornhill sent her a book on homeopathy, and William Smith Williams of Smith, Elder and Co also sent her a book on homeopathy and advised her to call a homeopath for Ellis Bell (Emily Bronte’s pseudonym).
Laurence Alma Tadema married the sister ofWilliam Smith Williams’ daughter-in-law in 1871. She was Laura Epps the daughter of George Napoleon Epps the half-brother of homeopath John Epps whom Charlotte Bronte consulted about homeopathic help for EmilyBronte. Charlotte was an advocate of homeopathy and she tried to persuade Emily to try it. In desperation, Charlotte Bronte wrote to John Epps, a homeopathic physician for advice about Emily, who tragically refused all medications at her end.
John Epps was a witness at the Old Bailey on 3.1.1833 for the whole proceedings on the King’s Commission of the Peace, Oyer and terminer and gaol delivery for the City of London, and gaol delivery for the County of Middlesex.
John Epps the eldest son of John Epps (see Epps family), was born into a Calvinist family in Sevenoaks, Kent in 1805.
He became disillusioned with the religious atmosphere he found himself in and, after being educated at the Protestant Dissenters’ Grammar School, Mill Hill (near Hendon), and, at 15, serving an apprenticeship to a apothecary of the name of Dury, he relocating in 1824, at the age of 18, to Edinburgh to study medicine.
While in Edinburgh he embraced the views on phrenology of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim and became friends with Scot phrenologists George and Andrew Combe. In 1827 Epps graduated with his degree at the age of 21.
He saw medicine as ‘a tool of liberation for the poor and lower classes’.
Epps authored a number of books during his life, starting before he attended university with, among other things, a work titled A New Way of Teaching English Grammar.
Immediately after graduating he moved back to London (eventually settling in Great Russell Street) where he began to practice (it is recorded that he was ‘much liked by, and inspired great confidence in his patients’) and also to lecture (initially at Aldersgate School of Medicine, and afterward at Westminster) on ‘chemistry, botany, and materia medica‘ at the Hunterian School of Medicine.
Here he published An Introduction to Botany, which was intended as a textbook for his students, and two books on phrenology called Evidences of Christianity Deduced from Phrenology and Horae Phrenologicae Being Three Phrenological Essays.
Throughout his adult life he lectured publically and extensively, particularly on phrenology and homoeopathy, both in London and in other large towns; when his health failed he continued to lecture in his own home.
Epps was drawn to homoeopathy in about 1837 after reading the works of Paul Francis Curie (his greatest influence in homeopathy, apart from Paul Francis Curie, was Samuel Hahnemann and his work The Organon of the Healing Art), and his first essay on homeopathy appeared the following year.
In line with his political views (see Political involvement below), John Epps had a ‘very large homoeopathic practice, especially among the lower middle and lower classes of society ‘, although he also had medical involvement with more well known people, such as Charlotte Bronte and Emily Bronte.
In 1831 he married and became Medical Director of the Royal Jennerian and London Vaccine Institution, an institution which up to his death he supported.
John Epps was a frequent contributor to The Lancet until he adopted homoeopathy. In 1843 The Lancet refused to publish reports of homoeopathic treatment; John Epps took these rejected articles and published them in a pamphlet entitled Rejected Cases, which also contained a vigorous letter to the editor of The Lancet (his friend, Thomas Wakley).
Epps was also involved in a number of other journals: He was for some time co-editor of the London Medical and Surgical Journal, and for a long period conducted the Christian Physician and Anthropological Magazine (1836-9), and The Journal of Health and Disease. He established a journal, Notes of a New Truth, for the propagation to nonprofessionals of the “new school” of homeopathy, to which he contributed up to the time of his decease.
As with Notes of a New Truth, the majority of Epps’ lectures were directed at nonprofessionals. However, he also lectured to medical professionals and was lecturer on materia medica at the Homeopathic Hospital, Hanover Square (c. 1861).
On the 31st of January 1869 Epps was ‘attacked with paralysis’ and, after a further ‘attack of paralysis, aggravated by acute asthma, from cold’ he died, at the age of 64, on February 12th. He was interred at Kensal Green Cemetery, February 10th, 1869, in the presence of a large number of political, medical and personal friends.
John Epps … was involved in procuring the repeal of the Test Acts (1829) and, along with Francis Place, W. J. Fox, Francis Burdett and others, with the passing the Reform Bill of 1832.
His campaigning for social justice also lead him to become a Chartist (in 1847 he stood for parliament with Chartist backing), and he was an active member of the Anti-Corn Law League and joined organizations in favor of the Polish, Italian, Hungarian, and American nationalities.
It is evident from his extensive lecturing on phrenology and homeopathy that Epps enjoyed giving public addresses, and the British Journal of Homoeopathy remarks that he was ‘as keenly fond of making a speech denouncing tyrants anywhere in the world as of giving a lecture on phrenology or Homeopathy’.
These frequent public appearances, and the active part Dr. Epps took against ‘Church Rates [tax], war, despots, corn laws, and other old institutions’, brought him into contact with many noted individuals, such as Joseph Hume, Lady Byron, George Wilson (president of the Anti-Corn Law League), Giuseppe Mazzini, Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, James Stansfeld, Lajos Kossuth, and Robert Owen.
From an early age he declared himself an enemy to church establishments and a paid ministry, which can be seen in some of the parlimentary reforms he pushed for. Epps strongly opposed church rates. He denounced the larger Protestant churches as being the “harlot daughters of Rome [i.e. the Roman Catholic Church]“.
While in Edinburgh he joined the Nonconformist Scotch Baptists who had no fixed minister, but those who were moved spoke. In this environment, at the age of 19, Epps became a preacher. However, when he returned to London he left the Scotch Baptists because there the sect was run more like the church systems he rejected. After this, regularly and for many years, he began preaching to mechanics at Dock Head Church.
Not only did Epps reject the orthodox church establisments, but he also rejected a number of the mainstream Christian doctrines. He rejected the doctrine of the immortal soul, emphasising instead resurrection as the escape from death. In this vain, the second coming of Christ is also emphasised.
Hell is the grave, he taught, not the place of torment of mainstream Christianity. He also rejected the Trinity, stating that Jesus is the Son of God, a human by nature. He also spoke out against the glorification of war-heroes: “the honour of the British flag is a specious phrase which blinds men’s eyes to right and wrong”, he said.
The most infamous of Epps’ unorthodox views regards the devil. According to Epps, references in the Bible to the devil and satan are, in the main, to be understood as personifications of the lustful principle in man.
In 1842 he anonymously published a work on this subject entitled The Devil: a Biblical exposition of the truth concerning that old serpent, the devil and Satan and a refutation of the beliefs obtaining in the world regarding sin and its source. The publication brought considerable opposition and, according to historian Alan Eyre, ‘a lecture given shortly afterward to the Tooting Institution at the Mitre Inn in … London … caused serious offence and led to widespread ostracism and hostility’.
Similarity, a few years priod to this he delivered a series of lectures at the Dock Head Church to demonstrate that the devil is not a personal being and ‘this bold assertion drew upon him a world of abuse, and some patients declined to be treated by one holding such heterodox views’.
John Epps’ faith stayed with him throughout his life; it is recorded that ‘with his last breath he expressed his humble, yet confident faith in the power, wisdom, and goodness of the Great Father of all spirits’.
John Epps is buried in the Kensal Green Cemetery in the ‘Dissenters’ Section.
Laura Therese Epps 1852 – 1909 was from 1871 the second wife of the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema and a painter in her own right.
Laura Epps the daughter of George Napoleon Epps the half-brother of John Epps.
Laura Epps‘ two sisters were also painters (Emily Epps studied under John Brett, a Pre-Raphaelite, and Ellen Nellie Epps under Ford Madox Brown), whilst Edmund William Gosse and Rowland Hill were her brothers-in-law.
It was at Madox Brown’s home that Lawrence Alma-Tadema first met her in December 1869, when she was aged 17 and he 33. (His first wife had died in May that year.) He fell in love at first sight, and so it was partly her presence in London (and partly the fact that only in England had his work consistently sold) that influenced him into relocating in England rather than elsewhere when forced to leave the continent by the outbreak of the Franco Prussian War in July 1870.
Arriving in London at the beginning of September 1870 with his small daughters and sister Artje, Lawrence Alma-Tadema wasted no time in contacting Laura, and it was arranged that he would give her painting lessons. During one of these, he proposed marriage. As he was then thirty-four and Laura was now only eighteen, her father was initially opposed to the idea. John Epps finally agreed on the condition that they should wait until they knew each other better.
They married in July 1871 and, though this second marriage proved childless, it also proved enduring and happy, with Laura acting as stepmother to her husband’s children by his first marriage.
The Paris Salon in 1873 gave Laura her first success in painting, and five years later, at the Paris International Exhibition, she was one of only two English women artists exhibited. Her other venues included the Royal Academy (from 1873), the Grosvenor Gallery and others in London.
She also had occasional work as an illustrator, particularly for the English Illustrated Magazine, and was well known as a hostess in their London residences at Regents Park and Grove-end Road. A memorial exhibition of her work was held at the Fine Art Society in 1910.
As well as frequently being painted by her husband after their marriage (The Women of Amphissa of 1887 being a notable example), she is also shown in a seated statuette by Amendola in 1879, a bust by Delou in 1876, and a portrait by Jules Bastien-Lepage.
She specialised in highly sentimental domestic and genre scenes of women and children, often in Dutch seventeenth-century settings and style, like Love’s Beginning, Hush-a-bye, The Carol, At the Doorway (c.1898, shown right) and Sunshine. She did paint some classical subjects and landscapes akin to those of her husband, but in general her main influence was 17th century Dutch art, which was a far less restrained influence in her work than his.
Richard Epps practiced at 22 Charlotte Street, Bedford Square.
The London Homeopathic Hospital was founded on 10.8.1850 by Frederick Hervey Foster Quin for the free treatment of the capital’s sick poor. It opened its doors to patients on Hahnemann’s birthday 10 April 1850.
The London Homeopathic Hospital has been rebuilt and extended several times from the original building. This book contains a lot of information about the London Homeopathic Hospital up to the year 1914. It was compiled by Dr. Richard Epps, a member of that great ‘homeopathic family’ of Epps’s, based in the London area with their homeopathic pharmacies in Threadneedle Street, in the City and at 60 Jermyn Street, St. James’s, London, SW1.
‘Epps Thatcher’ pharmacies were first established in 1839, but had all gone by 1962
Washington Epps 1848-1912 LRCP Senior Assistant Physician, London Homeopathic Hospital also practiced at 80 Great Russell Street
Washington Epps MBHS, MRCS England 1871, LRCP Edinburgh, LM Edin. 1871. Assistant Physician at the London Homeopathic Hospital in 1889…
Washington Epps died at his residence in Wellgarth Road, Hampstead, there passed away as gently as he had lived, Washington Epps, the last medical representative of a family intimately associated with the rise and progress of homeopathy in the UK.
He was the youngest son of George Napoleon Epps, and nephew of John Epps, of Richard Epps, and of James Epps, the homeopathic chemist, all of whom were intimately concerned, in the early days of homeopathy, in its being brought, by means of lectures and pamphlets, within the purview of the intelligent laity all over the kingdom.’
Washington Epps was at the London Homeopathic Hospital in the early days and during its rebuilding and extension. In a very busy life, numerous items also flowed from his pen, including 14 articles in the journals and a sound homeopathic text on skin conditions -Skin Diseases Treated Homeopathically and ‘now in its fourth edition’.
Charles Edwin Wheeler says he was ‘of strikingly handsome personal appearance…and very much beloved by all his patients.’ Upon his cremation on Thursday 17 October 1912, at Golders Green, nearly all the medical and surgical staff of the London Homeopathic Hospital were present.
Washington Epps gave lectures and was a contributor to the Journal of the British Homeopathic Society.
The Epps family were also publishers. Janes Epps & Co published James Compton Burnett Diseases of the Spleen. The Epps books were published in America by Otis Clapp.
Ellen Elliott Epps wrote The living among the dead, Blenham; or, What came of troubling the waters, Practical observations on health and long life,
Ellen (Nellie) Epps wrote children’s stories, contributed to various journals.
George Napoleon Epps wrote On Deformities of the Spine and on Club Foot,
James Epps wrote Dog Diseases treated by Homeopathy
John Epps wrote The life of John Walker, Homeopathy and Its Principles Explained, Horae Phrenologicae Being Three Phrenological Essays, Evidences of Christianity Deduced from Phrenology, Lectures on Physiology in relation to the influence of parents on the offspring, Constipation, its cause and cure, Consumption and its treatment, Spinal Curvature, its theory and cure, The Homeopathic Family Instructor, The Homeopathic Domestic Physician with Joseph Hyppolyte Pulte, Diseases of Women, Diseases of Children, Ovarian and Womb Diseases: Their Causes, Diagnosis, and Cure, The Rejected Cases: With a Letter to Thomas Wakley, Diary of the Late John Epps, M.D. Edin: Embracing Autobiographical Records with Ellen Gosse and Ellen Elliott Epps, On the Virtues of Arnica, Affections of Women, Affections of the Head and Nervous Systems, Epilepsy and some nervous affections, On Arnica Montana, and he edited Notes of a New Truth and was co-editor of the London Medical and Surgical Journal, and for a long period conducted the Christian Physician and Anthropological Magazine and The Journal of Health and Disease. Joh Epps also wrote The Devil: a Biblical exposition of the truth concerning that old serpent, the devil and Satan and a refutation of the beliefs obtaining in the world regarding sin and its source.
Washington Epps wrote many journal articles.
Sue :: Jul.30.2008 :: British History :: 1 Comment »
Thank you very much for your website full of information about British Homeopathy.
You can add in your bibliography the following information
Counteraction viewed as a means of cure with remarks on the uses of the issue. By John EPPS London : Renshaw and Rush, 356, Strand, 1832.
I have also another adress for James EPPS and Co, Homoeopathic Chemists, 48 THREADNEEDLEST &170, Piccadilly London
Sincerely yours.
Marc