Medical Journals: Alternative, Complimentary, Fringe

This essay, still work in progress, on the radical temperance-vegetarian publisher William Horsell, provides a detailed study of his publishing career and radical or reform affiliations in the early to mid-Victorian period, supplementing the references in my book 'Of Victorians and Vegetarians', and expanding on the biography provided in my entry on Horsell in the 'Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'. It includes a draft listing of works published, or retailed, by Horsell, or Horsell and publishing partners.

Women's stories are nearly always obscured in our human history, and women who supported or practiced homeopathy especially so. In this short essay I have chosen three powerful, clever, industrious and innovative women who did emerge from the broad sweep of 19 th Century history and managed to make a significant impact upon our modern world. However, they could not have achieved their well-earned place in British history without the support and succour of our early homeopathic ancestors, bless them all! Whether concealed or explosively appearing like glowing comets from the pages of human history, these three women really did shine like small suns in their time. I would also draw my reader's attention to the interconnectedness of all of these people in their time, and make the point that a few astonishing people can change the course of history, and light the way for us all to follow in our own troubled times… Networking has always been the key! To illustrate this point more effectively, I have also snuck in mention a few other amazing women in the footnotes, alongside some pretty amazing men!

Medical history, 2003

Hydropathy and its Historians During the 1820s Vincent Priessnitz established Grafenberg' as the first centre for hydropathy, his novel modification ofwater-based therapies. As word ofthe seemingly miraculous cure spread, spiralling numbers of patients journeyed from across Europe, and further afield, to place themselves under Priessnitz's care.2 It was not, however, until the early 1840s that hydropathy impinged upon the consciousness of Britain's medical practitioners and valetudinarians. While short reviews describing the new therapy appeared in the medical press in 1841,3 it was Captain Claridge who was responsible for mobilizing British interest in the water cure. In 1842 he published an account of his experiences as a patient of Priessnitz, and followed this with a tireless lecture tour around the British Isles.4 His descriptions of hydropathy appealed to a public whose ardour remained undimmed for any therapy that promised relief from disease. The bulk of the medical practitioners were less convinced. Some reacted

Co-authored with Robert C. Fuller. In in Bioethics, 4th Edition, Vol. 1, edited by Bruce Jennings (Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2014), 163-172.

This article explores the production and consumption of phrenological knowledge for and by middle-class women in the USA during the early and middle decades of the 19th century. At a time when science itself had few boundaries, women became readers, consumers, proselytizers and practitioners of this knowledge system, outside of a scientific academy. This paper argues that phrenological beliefs about sex differences enabled and encouraged women to be users. Phrenology allowed women to negotiate gender and by encouraging followers to ‘know thyself,’ phrenology blurred the lines of expertise, creating a fluid interplay between users and producers of knowledge. This article then shows how categories of women users–practitioners, consumers and feminists–implemented or rejected elements of phrenology as they sought to affirm or amend prescribed gender roles. As the industrial economy seemed to divide public and private, production and consumption, masculine and feminine, phrenology allowed women and men to stand within and between these binaries. At the same time, some women used phrenology to classify themselves and others in a socio-natural hierarchy and further engrained scientific racism in American culture.

Journal of the History of Biology, 2019

In the nineteenth century, farmers, doctors, and the wider public shared a family of questions and anxieties concerning heredity. Questions over whether injuries, mutilations, and bad habits could be transmitted to offspring had existed for centuries , but found renewed urgency in the popular and practical scientific press from the 1820s onwards. Sometimes referred to as "Lamarckism" or "the inheritance of acquired characteristics," the potential for transmitting both desirable and disastrous traits to offspring was one of the most pressing scientific questions of the nineteenth century. As I argue in this paper, Carpenter's religious commitments to abolition and the temperance movement shaped his understanding of heredity. But this also committed him to a body of evidence for the inheritance of acquired characteristics that was coming under criticism for being untrustworthy. Carpenter used his popular treatises on physiology to promote these older, familiar ideas about heredity because they provided vital means of arguing for the unity of mankind and the hereditary dangers of intemperance. While early nineteenth century physiology has been seen by some historians as a challenge to religious authority, given its potentially materi-alist accounts of the body and the actions of the soul, this paper demonstrates how the missionary and institutional activities of the Unitarian church were ideologically supported by Carpenter's publications.

British Homoeopathic journal, 1996

Basic information on the history of vaccination and anti-vaccinationism in the US and Germany is followed by discussion of the various opportunities for homoeopaths to assess vaccination and the different assessments made in the early history of homoeopathy. Attitudes to vaccination are explored in American homoeopathic publications (books, selected journals, family medical guides). American homoeopathy is shown to have tended toward integration with conventional medicine rather than criticism of and opposition to it. Late 19th century American homoeopathy is shown to have been influenced by non-homoeopathic ideas. It did, however, have some characteristic ways of focusing on diseases, especially chronic diseases and their treatment in a specifically homoeopathic way, with homoeopathic physicians thinking in terms of 'constitution' and showing therapeutic optimism.

This draft essay examines the dietetic discourse and associated debates appearing in the ultra-radical and mystic James 'Shepherd' Smith's journal 'The Shepherd' in the 1830s, and in the more widely-read penny journal edited by Smith, 'The Family Herald' in the 1840s.