Sue Young Homeopathy

Spencer Timothy Hall 1812 – 1885 MA, PhD University of Tubingen 1852 was a British lay homeopath who achieved National fame lecturing on Mesmerism. Spencer Timothy Hall was also a phrenologist, spiritualist and hydrotherapist, and he was the Editor of the Phreno Magnet from 1843, and Editor of the Iris Newspaper from the early 1840s, and he was also Secretary to the Society for the Abolition of Corporal Punishment.

Spencer Timothy Hall was the Mesmeric practitioner of Harriet Martineau,

Spencer Timothy Hall was a student of George Dunn at Doncaster St James’s Homeopathic Hospital, and he was a correspondent of Charles Dickens, and a friend of Elizabeth Browning, The Earl of Carlisle, Robert Chambers, John Clare, Allan Cunningham, William Howitt, Robert Millhouse, James Montgomery, Lord Nugent, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alaric Alexander Watts, William Wordsworth, and many others.

Harriet Martineau’s life was changed forever when she received treatment from Mersmerist and homeopath Spencer Timothy Hall.

Alfred Russel Wallace took every opportunity to attend the lectures of Spencer Timothy Hall, the most eloquent spokesman for the new science of Mesmerism and homeopathy.

Spencer Timothy Hall was a Laureate of Sherwood Forest, and he was known as the Sherwood Forester.

Spencer Timothy Hall was the son of a Nottigham Quaker cobbler, who worked as a stockingmaker and printer before he turned to poetry, essay writing and journalism. He practiced hydrotherapy and homeopathy in Derby, Kendal, Burnley and elsewhere before settling in Blackpool in 1881. Spencer Timothy Hall lectured Nationally on Mesmerism, and he edited the Phreno Magnet from 1843.

Spencer Timothy Hall was for a short time a lay assistant to George Dunn at Doncaster St James’s Homeopathic Hospital [1850s-c80].

Hall was the son of Samuel Hall [1769-1852] a Quaker cobbler and Eleanor Spencer, a Derbyshire shepherdess and milkmaid. (see the article on the Hall family in Old and New Nottingham).

He was a persistent truant as a child, but eventually became apprenticed to a printer in Nottingham and then founded, about 1830, a scientific institution in the town at which he read essays.

He mixed with the literati of the town [chiefly the famous Howitt literary family of Nottingham (William Howitt) [DNB, 1995, pp.1502-3]] through whom he met William Wordsworth [1770-1850], Alaric Alexander Watts, the London poet and journalist, and Allan Cunningham, the Scottish poet and man of letters.

Hall published verses before setting up as a printer and bookseller in his own right in York. This covered most of the 1840s. Further literary success and prose publications followed. He then became interested in phrenology and lectured upon it. He became the first Honorary Secretary of the Sheffield Phrenological Society.

Further publications followed and he obtained an MA and PhD from University of Tubingen. ‘He was a foreign graduate, having received the diploma of Doctor of Medicine and Philosophy from the University of Tubingen’ [Manchester Guardian, 28 April 1885].

However, in the 1867 Homeopathic Medical Directory his entry on page 32 appears, along with four others, under the heading ‘Practitioners Holding Degrees… Not Recognised as Legal Qualifications In England’. His qualifications appear as ‘MD Eclectic Medical College of Cincinnati; PhD MD Tubingen, Principal of Windermere Hydropathic Institution‘ and his Address ‘Bowness, Windermere, Westmoreland’.

About 1852 he became a homeopathic doctor and published Homeopathy, a Testimony in the same year. He had dabbled earlier not only in phrenology but also Mesmerism and published items about that subject. He eventually settled in Kendal and was in charge of a hydropathic institution there.

But his affairs and his health were giving constant concern and he ended up as a pauper in Blackpool where he died in poverty. He died in April 1885; Obituary in the Manchester Guardian 28 & 30-4-1885; [see also Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits, 1986]. Apart from numerous literary and travel works, Dr. Hall published, Mesmeric Experiences [1845], Homeopathy, a Testimony [1851], Homeopathy and Hydrotherapy, Their Harmony and Efficacy [1865]. [see Dictionary of National Biographies, 1917, Vol. viii, OUP, p.974; and Manchester Guardian, 1885, Dr. Spencer T Hall, Obituary, 28-4-1885.]

Spencer Timothy Hall was a writer and mesmerist. He was born in a cottage near Sutton in Ashfield in Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire, the son of Samuel Hall a Quaker cobbler and Eleanor Spencer, a dairymaid. He received some education from his father and at seven years of age entered the weaving trade.

After reading the life of Benjamin Franklin, Hall resolved to become a printer. In January 1829 he went to Nottingham and was apprenticed at the office of The Mercury newspaper. He began writing poetry, and by 1832 he was contributing verse to The Mirror, The Metropolitan Magazine and other periodicals.

In 1836 Hall returned to Sutton in Ashfield, where he started his own printing and bookselling business, and printed a monthly periodical called the Sherwood Magazine, in which he published his work under the name of ‘The Sherwood Forester’.

In May 1839 he joined the printing firm Hargrove at York. In 1841 he published a volume of prose and verse entitled The Forester’s Offering. The book earned Hall an invitation from James Montgomery to Sheffield, where he became co-editor of The Iris newspaper and governor of the Hollis Hospital.

He wrote a volume of prose sketches entitled Rambles in the Country for The Iris; it was reissued in an enlarged form in 1853 as The Peak and the Plain. As the result of a visit to Ireland in the famine years he published Life and Death in Ireland as Witnessed in 1849 (1850).

Hall was also interested in popular scientific movements. He was the first honorary secretary of the Sheffield Phrenological Society and later an honorary member of the Phrenological Society of Glasgow. In 1841 he learned about mesmerism from watching some spectacular demonstrations by a Frenchman named Lafontaine, who was touring northern England.

Hall then taught himself mesmerism and began to make his own tours of the country, giving public demonstrations, offering tutelage and therapy, and selling copies of a journal he founded in 1843, The Phreno magnet, and Mirror of Nature.

His most illustrious patient was Harriet Martineau, whom, it seems, he cured of an apparently hopeless disease of the uterus. Harriet Martineau was first diagnosed in 1839; after over five years of suffering, she was introduced to mesmerism by her brother in law, who had been impressed by one of Hall’s lectures in Newcastle. ‘Everything that medical skill and family care could do for me had been tried, without any avail’, Harriet Martineau wrote in her Autobiography (1877), ‘Now that a new experiment was proposed to me … I had nothing to do but try it’.

About 1852 Hall became a homeopathic doctor, and published Homeopathy, a Testimony (1852). He was granted the honorary degrees of MA and PhD from Tübingen.

He was married twice: his first wife, Sarah, died only nine months after their wedding; his second marriage produced several children. He died at Blackpool on 26 April 1885, and was buried in Layton Cemetery.