James Graham (quack doctor)

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Graham with some of his patients.

James Graham (born June 23, 1745 in Edinburgh , † June 23, 1794 in Edinburgh) was a Scottish doctor . He is often described in the literature as a quack and eccentric. He treated patients with "magnetic cures", developed unconventional sex therapies and opened a "Temple of Health" in London , in which he set up a heavenly bed and where the young Emma Hamilton is said to have appeared naked. In the later years of his life he became a Christian zealot and pamphleteer .

Origin and first medical activity

James Graham was the son of the Scottish saddler William Graham and his wife Jean. He was trained in medicine at Edinburgh University , which was then considered a leader in Europe in the field. During his studies he attended lectures by several professors of medicine, such as Alexander Monro I , William Cullen and Robert Whytt , but without achieving a degree. Nevertheless, he later attached himself the title of doctor. He married Mary Pickering at the age of 25. From this marriage there were three children.

In 1770 Graham left the British Isles and went to North America in what is now the United States , which at that time still belonged to the British colonial empire. There he worked as an ophthalmologist and ear doctor. He settled in Philadelphia for about two years , where he learned from the British researcher Ebenezer Kinnersley about the new knowledge that the American statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin had made in the field of electricity . This was a basis for his later medical treatment method.

At the first signs of the outbreak of the American Revolution , Graham left the New World again in 1774 and practiced his profession first in Bristol , then in the spa town of Bath and in 1775 in London. At the beginning of 1777 he practiced again in Bath, marketed his cures effectively and gained first notoriety through his treatment by Catherine Macaulay . When this English historian and feminist married in December 1778, at the age of 47, William Graham, a brother of James Graham, who was just 21, it caused a public scandal. James Graham treated people who were concerned about their health and who believed their nerves had been damaged. He put his patients on a “magnetic throne” or in baths through which mild electrical currents flow, and let them breathe in “electrical ether”, ie plant extracts that were supposedly exposed to an electrical field.

During a trip that Graham took to the European continent in the summer of 1779, he visited Paris, among others . The famous Italian alchemist Alessandro Cagliostro also worked there in the following years , who, like Graham , was able to take advantage of the interest in occultism at the time. In Aachen , which was also on Graham's travel plan, he claimed to have treated many noble patients to their satisfaction.

Temple of Health

In the autumn of 1779 Graham opened his so-called "Temple of Health" or "Temple of Aesculapius" in what is now the City of Westminster in London , which was located in the Adelphi Buildings near the Thames . He successfully advertised his establishment and described the luxurious interior of the temple on billboards. These included complicated electrical devices, an “electric throne” insulated by glass columns and, as the greatest touted sensation, a “heavenly bed”, which cost the proud price of £ 50 per night to use. In return, impotent people who slept in it would supposedly regain their fertility. Married couples should be supported in fulfilling their desire to have children. The bed, about three and a half meters long and two and a half meters wide, was most splendidly decorated with gold and silk. Associated batteries of magnets should exert a powerful effect. Whoever went to bed could breathe in exciting oriental scents and listen to magical music. An engraved message urged: "Be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth". ("Be fruitful, multiply and replenish the earth")

Graham also performed beautiful, scantily clad girls in his temple, who were presented as "goddesses of health." According to a contemporary poster, the giant goddess Hygieia appeared in antique poses that could sing wonderfully. Emma Hamilton , who later became famous as the lover of the English sea hero Horatio Nelson , is said to have been shown to the public in Graham's temple in 1781, when she was still a young girl and was called Emma Lyon, completely naked, only covered with a loosely falling gauze veil, as the goddess of health .

The temple of health soon became known across London. Graham was only interested in wealthy customers and therefore asked for an entrance fee of five shillings. Two huge bouncers, who are said to have been two meters tall, kept the numerous onlookers away. The ladies who frequented the temple hid their faces behind a veil in order not to be recognized. The doctor gave lectures, sold his medicines, promoted supposedly healing cures such as mud baths and gave therapeutic advice on a happy sex life, which is the prerequisite for a healthy existence. He saw the generation of offspring as a patriotic duty to increase the population and vehemently rejected prostitution and masturbation .

Graham was branded a quack and a charlatan, for example by the English writer and politician Horace Walpole , who made derogatory comments about him in a letter from August 1780. Mocking poems, newspaper sketches and satirical plays such as George Colman's The Genius of Nonsense (1780) took him on the shovel.

Next life

As Graham after some time his residence in the Adelphi Buildings could not afford more, he retired in the spring of 1781 in the at the Pall Mall located Schomberg House to where it a Temple of Health and Hymen instituted. Nonetheless, his debts grew so that his property was put up for forced sale in December 1782. But he was able to buy most of it back. In July / August 1783, he held his back in the Edinburgh Adelphi Buildings put forward Lecture on generation about sexual health. When he was no longer allowed to repeat this in public because of immoral content, he violently attacked the city authorities in a letter. He was briefly detained in Tolbooth Prison, where he preached to the inmates. After his release on August 19, 1783, he held lectures in various other cities, but was sometimes banned from performing. Among other things, he stayed in Paris again in 1786.

Since around 1783 Graham no longer propagated treatment methods using electricity so much, but increasingly praised "earth baths" as a successful medical therapy. At public demonstrations he let himself be buried naked up to his chin and explained the benefits of earth baths, which he described in detail in the Short treatise on the all-cleansing, all-healing, and all-invigorating qualities of the simple earth (1790). He advocated a vegetarian lifestyle and refused to eat and drink too much.

From the late 1780s, Graham turned intensely to religion, regretting his earlier extravagant life, and becoming a Christian zealot. He demonstrated his earth bath therapy and preached his theological views while traveling across Britain. At times he was imprisoned in his home in Edinburgh for insanity. In early 1793 he claimed that he had fasted for more than two weeks and only drank cold water; he would have persevered by wearing peat on his bare body and smearing his limbs with his essential balm.

Graham died unexpectedly on his 49th birthday (June 23, 1794) in his home in Edinburgh and was buried in Greyfriars Cemetery in his hometown.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Roy Porter (ODNB vol. 23, p. 198) considers this story to be a later legend.
personal data
SURNAME Graham, James
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Scottish doctor
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1745
PLACE OF BIRTH Edinburgh
DATE OF DEATH June 23, 1794
Place of death Edinburgh