Sue Young Homeopathy

James Manby Gully (MD Edin. 1829 LRCS) 1808 – 1883 Fellow of the Royal Physical Society, Fellow of the Royal Medico Chirurgical Society was an orthodox physician who converted to homeopathy, and he was well known for practising hydrotherapy, or the “water cure”.

Along with his partners James Wilson, John Chapman and James Smith Ayerst, he founded a very successful hydropathy and homeopathic clinic in Malvern, Worcestershire, which had many notable Victorians, including such figures as Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Edwin Chadwick, Samuel Wilberforce, Florence Nightingale, Benjamin Disraeli, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Edward Bulwer Lytton, William Gladstone, George Hamilton Gordon, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Babington Macaulay and Queen Victoria as clients.

James Manby Gully and Amos Henriques drew fire from the Allopathic doctors because of their conversion to homeopathy, which provoked moves to have their names removed from the list of Fellows of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society in 1851.

James Manby Gully was also a colleague of William Edward Ayerst, Hugh Cameron, John Chapman, Matthew James Chapman, Edward Charles Chepmell, Paul Francois Curie, William Vallancy Drury, George Napoleon Epps, James Epps, John Epps, James Manby Gully, Edward Hamilton, George Calvert Holland, Richard Hughes, Joseph Kidd, Thomas Robinson Leadam, Victor Massol, J Bell Metcalfe, Samuel Thomas Partridge, Henry Reynolds, John Rutherford Russell, David Wilson, Stephen Yeldham and many others.

James Manby Gully was a disciple of Vincent Priessnitz and he practiced hydrotherapy and homeopathy at Malvern for thirty years, retiring in 1872. He became a member of the British Homeopathic Society in 1848.

James Manby Gully was responsible for promoting the newly fashionable hydrotherapy in England, and because of his famous clients, for promoting this therapy in America too. He was one of the many bridges between our two countries.

James Manby Gully graduated in Edinburgh in 1829, so he may have attended lectures by Robert Knox. Gully may also have witnessed the execution of William Burke.

James Manby Gully was also a friend and supporter of David Dunglas Home and he was very interested in spiritualism.

James Manby Gully was born in Kingston, Jamaica, the son of a wealthy coffee planter. When he was 6 he was taken to England to attend school in Liverpool, then went on to the College de St. Barbe in Paris.

He became a medical student at the University of Edinburgh in 1825, as did Charles Darwin in the same year. After three years at Edinburgh, Gully became an externe at L’École de Médecíne in Paris, then returned to Edinburgh to take his MD in 1829.

Gully began his practise as a physician in London in 1830, and went on to write and translate numerous medical books and papers, becoming a Fellow of the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London and a Fellow of the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh. He edited the London Medical and Surgical Journal and the Liverpool Medical Gazette.

Gully showed an open interest in the dangerously radical idea of transmutation of species, and translated an evolutionary treatise on Comparative Physiology by the embryologist Friedrich Tiedemann.

He was continually dissatisfied with the medical treatments of the time, and in 1837 met James Wilson who then spent some time on the continent and returned in 1842 enthused with the idea of hydrotherapy. The two set up a partnership and opened a “water cure” clinic at Malvern offering a regimen similar to that at Vincent Priessnitz’s Gräfenberg clinic.

In 1846 Gully published The Water Cure in Chronic Disease, describing the treatments available at the clinic….

The fame of the establishment grew, and Gully and James Wilson became well known national figures. Two more clinics were opened at Malvern…

With his fame he also attracted criticism: Sir Charles Hastings, a physician and founder of the British Medical Association, was a forthright critic of hydropathy, and Dr Gully in particular.

Dr. Gully’s patients at Malvern were woken at 5 am, undressed and wrapped in wet sheets then covered with blankets. An hour of later buckets of water were thrown upon the patients who then went on a five mile walk, carrying an alpenstock and a Gräfenberg flask of mineral water, stopping at wells for the waters.

They returned to the Malvern pump room for a breakfast of dry biscuits and water. They then had the day to spend bathing in a range of kinds of baths, or in some cases wore a wet sheet called the “Neptune Girdle” round their middle at all times, removing it only at meal times. Dinner which was always boiled mutton and fish was followed by a few hours in a dry bed.

The exercise, plain food and absence of alcohol together with the congenial company of other wealthy patrons proved generally beneficial….

Gully was an articulate and popular public speaker and writer. He was also a firm believer in a number of women’s causes. He advocated women’s suffrage, and preached temperance, due to the detrimental affects of alcohol on the husbands of many Victorian women.

Gully separated the sexes strictly at his clinics, as he believed that many female psychological complaints (depression, anxiety, hypochondria, hysteria) were due to the pressures Victorian women were under to be chaste, ambitionless, efficient, selfless givers, at the expense of their own mental well-being.

Gully believed in the value of homeopathic medicines, adding references to his positive experiences with homeopathy in later editions of his water cure book; stating that:

“It is well and wise to observe and investigate these things before laughing at them”.

Like many of his educated contemporaries both in the UK, and in the USA^, Gully showed an interest in several popular movements of the day, such as women’s suffrage, mesmerism and diagnostic clairvoyance, and in later life he came to believe in spiritualism.

In 1872, he met a young woman named Florence Ricardo (later Florence Bravo). They became secret lovers. The following year, after travelling with Gully to Kissingen in Germany, Florence became pregnant. Gully performed an abortion. Thereafter, their relationship became purely Platonic.

Florence subsequently met and fell in love with Charles Bravo, whom she married in 1875. On hearing the news from a third party, Gully reportedly tore the letter to shreds. Just a few short months later, on April 18, 1876, Charles Bravo died of poisoning. The culprit was never discovered; Gully was a suspect, along with Florence herself, but although he testified at the inquest, nothing further came of the case. In 1923, Sir Harry Poland QC, who was involved for the crown in the case, stated that “Dr. Gully was in no way implicated”.