120 social history of alcohol and drugs, volume 28, … social history of alcohol and drugs, volume...

Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 28, No. 2 (Summer 2014)120

SHAD (Summer 2014): 120-42

James Kneale is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography at University Col-lege London.

dr grAnvIlle’s thunderbolt: drInk And the publIc In the lIfe of

one nIneteenth-century doctor

JAmes kneAle

Abstract. In 1891 Dr Joseph Mortimer Granville wrote a series of let-ters to the Times that amounted to what one commentator described as “a plea for the use of more alcohol.” Though he was denounced by the British Medical Journal, Granville provoked a month-long de-bate on the merits and dangers of moderate drinking. Granville’s ca-reer was highly unorthodox, though common themes emerge from his biography that help explain his arguments for “rational drinking.” He was very much a creature of the developing nineteenth-century pub-lic sphere: he had been a hospital and workhouse surgeon; the editor, briefly, of a conservative newspaper, and then a popular medical writer; a statistician using public knowledge to explore social problems and their solutions; and a tireless self-publicist who received both mockery and praise from the satirical press. Granville is almost entirely forgot-ten now, though he was relatively well known towards the end of his life. However, his ideas remind us that the public’s view of drinking was not solely shaped by the dogmas of temperance and trade, and while he was hardly a typical Victorian doctor, tracing Granville’s en-gagement with drink also reveals something of the changing nature of the nineteenth-century public sphere.

IntroductIon: mAkIng Arguments About drInk publIc

In September 1891 an English doctor named Joseph Mortimer Granville (1833-1900) wrote to the Times. Responding to a letter published in the newspaper from Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the leader of the UK Alliance, Gran-ville argued that drinking was necessary for health, and that abstinence was weakening British resistance to disease.1 The letter – which the Pall Mall Gazette described as “Dr Granville’s thunderbolt” – drew angry responses from teetotallers, churchmen and doctors, to whom Granville replied in the Times, in articles written for periodicals, and in at least one public meet-ing.2 The ongoing argument was widely reported in British newspapers and periodicals well into December. Some of this reporting was sensa-tional: one of the Hull Daily Mail’s reports of the story carried the subtitle

Kneale: Drink and the public in the life of one nineteenth-century doctor 121

“CONSUMPTION AND CANCER FLOURISH UNDER A TEETOTAL REGIME.”3 Other papers enjoyed the discomfort Granville had caused teetotallers. The Conservative Nottingham Guardian gleefully described it as “A SHOCKER FOR SIR WILFRID LAWSON” saying the story “must make Sir Wilfrid Lawson’s hair stand on end.”4 Granville was widely de-nounced at temperance gatherings across England, and he was caricatured in a magic lantern slide demonstration in Hull.5 Granville’s name would be commonly associated with anti-temperance arguments for the next four or five years and his opinion was still being cited in 1898.

This story is an excellent example of the kind of public debate histori-ans have used to explore attitudes to drinking. The growth of the press in the second half of the nineteenth century provides us with an extensive archive, now increasingly accessible through digitisation. It also seems to offer a particular kind of information, one of starkly polarised opinions and exaggerated reporting – exactly the sort of media discourse associated with the “moral panic.” This idea, perhaps most influentially explored in Stan-ley Cohen’s 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, traces the media’s framing of episodes of “deviance” as “the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people.”6 It is tempt-ing to see Granville’s letter, which was attacked by exactly these kinds of people, as part of a panic over drinking, but the moral panic has two main limitations when it comes to historical analysis.

Firstly, it is often hard to know whether the media discourses that con-stitute the evidence for a moral panic are effective: was anyone genuinely upset or persuaded? While recent histories and geographies of books and readers have brought us fascinating insights into the varied interpretations of works like Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Crea-tion, it is much harder to answer these questions when the text in ques-tion is not one of the publishing sensations of the nineteenth century but a short-lived argument in the Times.7 Were these views representative of the opinions of their readers, “people who would otherwise remain silent in the historical record”, or did they shape those opinions?8 Secondly it can be equally difficult to discover how strongly these opinions were held by their authors, or their motivations for circulating them, because writing for the public is rather different to writing for known interlocutors.9 To see this we only have to compare Lawson’s reply to Granville in the Times to the pri-vate letters that Lawson wrote to Edward Vivian of Torquay in the 1880s, which are full of light-hearted and disrespectful doggerel about Gladstone and others.10 The danger here is that without any context the author comes to stand for a particular view or position, reducing complicated arguments about drinking to a Manichean struggle between the monolithic entities of “temperance” and “trade.” Read this way Granville’s letter simply identi-fies him as anti-temperance and Conservative.

Alternatively, we might consider broader ideas of “public debate” be-


yond the focus on moral panics that characterises many histories of the drink question, and we also need to contextualise the “thunderbolt” debate, reconstructing something of Granville’s biography to provide a more nu-anced account of his arguments. In fact Granville is only visible through the sources associated with his public roles; other biographical sources are hard to find beyond published records like censuses and directories.11

Bringing these two insights together, this paper explores the publicness of drink – the ways in which drinking was seen to be a public issue. The ge-ographer Clive Barnett suggests that “public” can refer to both the subject and the object of “concerted action,” in other words to both the people who constitute the public and to the character of things like drinking that are of more than private concern. As Barnett suggests, “the value ascribed to publicness is closely related to the principle that some issues gain their im-portance both from affecting and being addressed by people acting together in concert.”12 Nineteenth-century drinking was clearly seen as a problem of public space, but this was a public concern more broadly: it affected the public, and collective action to deal with drink was taken in the public’s name, even if it did not always reflect the public’s will.13 Crucially, how-ever, the medium through which this issue is discussed must be open and accessible. The classic analysis of this is Jurgen Habermas’ exploration of the public sphere – an imagined space of intellectual exchange, effec-tively the classical agora extended by new technologies of print – which he thought had been gradually co-opted by the emerging culture industry towards the end of the nineteenth century.14 While Habermas’s discussion of the emergence and value of publicness remains important, this paper does not assume that this public was ever genuinely open to all, or that it became “closed” by the start of the twentieth century.

The nineteenth century saw dramatic changes in the ways that ordinary Britons engaged with arguments about drink and drunkenness. Cheap print, particularly from the 1850s, and growing literacy rates meant these discus-sions were accessible to a wider range of readers. Publicness was closely associated with the press, with Mark Hampton suggesting “Habermas’s own depiction of a rational space between individuals and the state neatly captures an ideal that permeated mid-Victorian elite society,” an “ideal of politics by public discussion.” Discussions of the role of the press turned on what Hampton calls the “educational ideal of the press,” the idea that newspapers should lead or inform their readers. However throughout the nineteenth century this co-existed with the “representative ideal,” the be-lief that the press should represent the public’s views, with the latter pre-dominating over the educational ideal from the 1880s in the form of the New Journalism.15 For Habermas, and some Victorian observers, this rep-resented the end of the liberal public sphere. However both the educational and representative ideals have positive and negative dimensions – educa-tion could be seen as propaganda, for example – and Granville’s argument contained elements of both.


The changing nature of the national and local state meant drink became even more firmly established as a public issue, because it became more closely bound up with questions of citizenship. Temperance organisations extended political agency to those who did not yet have the vote, for ex-ample: women, working-class men, and children.16 Many different actors, including the two main political parties and various medical and religious factions, employed newspapers, rallies, parliamentary bills and petitions to engage with these new public actors, seeking to lead them or claiming to represent the will of the people.

Granville offers us an interesting way into these debates as he was very much a creature of this changing public world. He involved himself with the state through the work he did for one of Bristol’s free hospitals, its cor-oner, and one of its workhouses; with the world of the press as the editor of a London newspaper; and with medicine through his association with the Lancet, as well as his authorship of many popular publications on health and wellbeing and participation in public argument in the letter columns of the press. Granville was quite well known towards the end of his life, associated with elements of the political, medical and artistic establish-ment. More recently, he has been the subject of a film, Hysteria, released in 2011, which focuses on his invention of the vibrator.17 Granville’s work is discussed in recent histories of the emotions, insomnia and sleep, neurol-ogy, and memory.18 However it is his work on insanity that has been given most attention, from Elaine Showalter’s early citation of The Care and Cure of the Insane through to a recent paper on asylum clothing by Jane Hamlett and Lesley Hoskins; Granville’s edition of Andrew Wynter’s The Borderlands of Insanity is also widely cited, for example in Andrew Scull’s recent work.19 Despite this attention there has been very little interest in Granville’s work on alcohol, and even less in his life as a whole.

The paper seeks to address these omissions. It begins by exploring the arguments initiated by Granville’s thunderbolt in some detail before sketching out his biography. The remainder of the paper explores four ways in which Granville encountered alcohol: his role as a public servant en-gaged in state medicine; his place in the public sphere of writing and ideas; his work in developing forms of public knowledge; and his sense of the anxieties caused by the arguments of sanitary and temperance reformers.

grAnvIlle’s “thunderbolt” And the publIc sphere

As noted above, this argument about drinking began in 1891 when Wilfrid Lawson, the President of the United Kingdom Alliance, wrote a letter to the Times contributing to a discussion about the extent to which publicans were responsible for drunkenness.20 Granville’s response ignored this point, as he sought to discredit the cause of temperance. He argued not only that moderate drinkers were healthier than abstainers, but also that “[t]here is less stamina in the life of the average Englishman now than there was 40


years ago.”21 Granville blamed this on the spread of teetotalism, which had even counteracted some of the advantages of improved sanitation, and on the growing popularity of light wines. Britons might live longer, he went on, but were more prone to illness – including insanity – since temper-ance had begun its “fanatical crusade.” This reply provoked a number of responses, from writers as varied as the Conservative MP (and brewer) J. T. Agg-Gardner, who prescribed light lager beer as the cure for this national malaise; the physician and freethinker Charles Drysdale, who strongly dis-agreed with Granville; Frederick Temple, then Bishop of London and later Archbishop of Canterbury, a long-time supporter of the Alliance; and Ame-lia Arnold of the Anti-Narcotic League, who blamed tobacco for this de-cline.22 Magazines and periodicals were equally varied in their responses. While the Spectator thought Granville was exaggerating, the author of its editorial on the topic agreed that “doubtless the whole tendency of mod-ern science is to preserve the unfit.”23 The Speaker published two hostile responses, arguing that Granville was cheapening a serious debate, while Punch published a supportive limerick that included the lines “Total absti-nence purely pernicious? Oh, Doctor, that’s really delicious!”24 A leading article in the British Medical Journal said

A more thoughtless and inaccurate letter has perhaps hardly ever appeared in the public press; it was full of propositions in favour of the habit of drinking, so extravagantly worded, so devoid of evidence, and it may fairly be said so contrary to fact, that it is deplorable that any educated medical man should have been willing to append his name to it.25

In October Granville published an essay on “Drink” in The National Review, developing his arguments and attacking his critics. Once again he stated that “the organism needs the alcohol… it should be the rule to sup-ply this need, no exception being made without medical advice.” He also argued that “rational drinking cures those ailments” commonly afflicting teetotallers (neuralgia, heart disturbances, gastric problems, indigestion).26 In a later letter, Granville insisted that healthy bodies required two ounces of pure alcohol a day, though he argued that drinking more was dangerous: “the neglect to supply the average organism with its due quantity of alco-hol is a cause of debility, and diminished power of resistance to disease.”27 The practice of prescribing alcohol to the sick was becoming less common amongst British practitioners as medical temperance exerted its influence; the two ounce figure, known as “Anstie’s limit,” had been established by Francis Edmund Anstie as a measure of safe, moderate consumption in the 1870s, and was popularised by influential writers like Edmund Alexander Parkes.28 For Granville, however, this upper threshold of moderate drink-ing was a required daily dose. One newspaper subtitled its coverage of the original story “A plea for the use of more alcohol” as a result.29 Criti-cal comments came from the likes of the Salvation Army and the British Women’s Temperance Association.30 By the mid-1890s, Granville had be-


come such a well-recognised enemy of temperance that when Dr Temple became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1896 he returned to the criticisms he had levelled at Granville five years earlier.31 Granville continued to pro-mote the health benefits of alcohol, claiming that cider could be good for rheumatism and digestion, and he was still writing to the newspapers in the years before his death in 1900.32

In some ways these arguments resemble other spats between supporters and opponents of temperance, and betray Granville’s deeply conservative views (in 1893 he contributed an article on “The teetotal craze from the physiological point of view” to the first ever number of the anti-Socialist periodical The Liberty Review).33 He was clearly out of step with main-stream medical opinion, as can be seen from the response of the British Medical Journal, which was prepared to accept that abstinence could be healthy. Granville himself noted “I am placing myself in antagonism to the majority of medical writers on this topic.”34 More importantly these argu-ments were not off-the-cuff remarks by a man keen to toe the party line; he had been developing many of these ideas since at least the 1870s, as his biography will reveal.

Joseph mortImer grAnvIlle (1833-1900)Born in Devonport, Devon, in 1833, Granville moved to London with his family some time before 1841.35 It seems likely that he received his medi-cal training in the capital and he was admitted to the Royal College of Sur-geons in 1856, the year he moved to Bristol.36 There he founded the Free Institution for the Treatment of Diseases Peculiar to Women and Children in 1857, which became the out-patients’ department of the Hospital for Children after Granville’s connection with it had faded.37 Anne Digby notes that the opening of most children’s hospitals between the 1850s and 1880s coincided with “the height of medical entrepreneurialism in the foundation of specialist institutions of all kinds.” 38 These hospitals represented a way of carving out a niche for oneself in a crowded medical market, where earning a living in practice was, as we will see, precarious. Making a liv-ing in medicine was no easy task in the nineteenth century. Irvine Loudon notes that many doctors “hovered for years between bare subsistence and bankruptcy;” many sought better prospects elsewhere.39 Between 1856 and 1867 Granville acted as surgeon at the Institution and also at the Royal Infirmary, worked in what we would now call general practice, conducted post-mortems for the Coroner, and was for a time surgeon to the Clifton workhouse. During this time he worked closely with the surgeon William George Ormerod, establishing a practice with him and subsequently mar-rying his daughter, Mary Ellen, in 1858. By 1861 Granville was practising and living off Portland Square, St Paul’s, Bristol; in the same year Gran-ville was admitted to the Royal College of Physicians.40

Within five years, though, his partnership with William Ormerod had


been dissolved; Granville seems to have moved to London, alone, in 1867 and was declared bankrupt the same year.41 Mary Granville and her two sons moved to Bedford and later to North London. It is not clear whether it was Granville’s marriage or the business that failed, or both, but this proved to be a pivotal moment in Granville’s life. Granville was to prove luckier or more resourceful than many other doctors, though, as he did get a second chance at a medical career. By 1871 he was a boarder in the household of a young widow and annuitant named Caroline Anne Bourne in her house on Euston Square; he would continue to live in Bourne’s household until his death, and she was the sole beneficiary of his (relatively modest) will. In the 1871 census Granville was listed as a “physician (not in practice)” – by then he had become a newspaper editor.42

In 1866 the London newspaper The Globe, “for many years recognized as the official Whig organ,” was bought by a Conservative syndicate whose members included the MP George Cubitt and Sir Stafford Northcote, later First Lord of the Treasury as Lord Iddesleigh.43 Granville edited the paper between 1871 and 1874 under the management of George Carlyon Hughes Armstrong. This change of career may seem surprising, but Granville had already contributed to the paper, and his cousin Mortimer Collins, a poet and novelist who shared Granville’s politics, had been one of the joint edi-tors before Armstrong took over.44 Most importantly, perhaps, Granville had become Northcote’s personal physician by this point; the two men shared conservative political views and West Country roots.45 Armstrong, who had been a Conservative election agent amongst other things, had no prior experience of journalism, and may well have appointed Granville for his politics, and Northcote’s patronage, rather than his editorial nous. Granville’s reign was short and undistinguished. The playwright and critic Joseph Comyns Carr remembered him as an irritating presence on the floor below and John Francis does not include Granville in his lists of editors and contributors.46 Journalists and editors working on rival publications were actively hostile to Granville, and the manner of his departure in 1874 suggests that he had fallen out with Armstrong.47

At this point Granville returned to general practice while continuing as Northcote’s physician and developing his journalistic career as a medical writer. Granville re-issued Andrew Wynter’s The Borderlands of Insanity and other papers (1875), with five additional chapters of his own, two years after Wynter’s death.48 The publication of this work seems to have grown out of his long-standing interest in nervous disease, as well as Granville’s involvement with the Lancet’s investigation into Lunatic Asylums from 1875. Granville was becoming increasingly respected as a medical author-ity. St Andrews made him a Doctor of Medicine in 1876, and at Granville’s death it was said that he had been a member of the Lancet’s staff for many years.49 Granville’s work on the Lancet investigation was probably what enabled him to become a Fellow of the Statistical Society of London in November 1875, and he donated a copy of the journal’s Report, which he


had edited, to the Library of the Society in 1877.50 Granville gave evidence before the Select Committee on Lunacy Law in June 1877, and in his own evidence Lord Shaftesbury described Granville as “a gentleman for whom I have the highest respect, and he has written a very interesting book.”51 Given Shaftesbury’s association with the existing system, it is hard to see this as anything other than high praise. Further, Louisa Lowe’s The Bas-tilles of England (1883) drew heavily on Granville’s figures to criticise the ease with which medical practitioners could have patients committed against their will.52

Perhaps emboldened by this success, Granville went on to publish sig-nificant works on nervous disorders and on gout – the two fields he would concentrate on for the rest of his career.53 At the same time he produced a series of popular health books including the pocket-sized shilling books published by David Bogue: Common Mind Troubles, The Secret of a Clear Head, Sleep and Sleeplessness, Youth: its care and culture, and How to Make the Best of Life, as well as Minds and Moods and Doubts, Difficul-ties and Doctrines through other publishers.54 He also published articles in Good Words, The Nineteenth Century, The Lancet, The Gentleman’s Maga-zine, and was to write regular letters to the Times. Granville’s entrepre-neurialism extended to inventing and patenting medical technologies, and in the late 1870s or early 1880s he produced a “percuteur,” a mechanical massager for nerve treatment, thought to be the first of its kind; in Nerve-vibration and excitation he claimed that his device predated Boudet’s by four years.55 It is this that has brought Granville some contemporary notori-ety, largely through Rachel P. Maines’ claim that his percuteur was the first vibrator, and that his use of it exemplified contemporary medical attitudes to hysteria as well as a prudish ignorance or denial of women’s sexuality.56

Granville’s increasingly respectable yet entrepreneurial brand of medi-cine led to a series of moves to progressively more prestigious premises: to Savile Row in Piccadilly in 1877, Welbeck Street in Marylebone in 1881, Hanover Square in 1884, and finally to Queen Anne Street, Cavendish Square in 1897.57 Granville’s practice in Hanover Square was next door to the much larger residence of Sir James Paget, who was of course strongly in favour of moderation rather than abstinence when it came to alcohol, and the son of a brewer to boot.58 Granville was described as a “society doctor,” though Lord Iddesleigh, his most famous client, died in 1887.59 Iddesleigh’s death, following a sudden heart attack at 10 Downing Street, does not seem to have harmed Granville’s career, and in fact brought him a good deal of publicity.60 As we have seen, Granville spent much of the last ten years of his life writing to the newspapers, publishing papers on drink-ing, and arguing with teetotallers and others. His health began to suffer from 1898, and he died in 1900; his death was fairly widely reported in the London, national and provincial newspapers.

This biographical sketch demonstrates that Granville lived very much


in the public eye, as well as taking on several different roles as a public servant. The remainder of the paper examines the publicness of drink in four related areas: Granville’s activities as a public servant; his place in the public sphere of print; his engagement with public ways of knowing drink; and the anxious citizen engendered by the public discussion of health and drinking.

drInk As A publIc problem For the first two decades of his career Granville engaged with the burgeon-ing but unreliable opportunities afforded by the development of state medi-cine and welfare, as we have seen. In this work he encountered alcohol in several different forms, which are well documented precisely because of the public’s interest in drink. The first case concerns his involvement with a serious assault in a Bristol pub that became a murder enquiry, with Granville acting as hospital surgeon, witness, and conductor of the post mortem. In the second, less dramatic, example, Granville’s purchases of alcoholic drinks for sick paupers raised questions about whether alcohol was medicine or food, as well as whether ratepayers should be paying for pauper’s drinking.

In 1859, Granville was working at Bristol’s Royal Infirmary, covering one of the usual house surgeons when a married woman named Jane Jones was admitted with serious injuries. Thinking she was dying, Jones accused a man named Peter Burston of striking her with an iron during an argument in the Black Horse pub on the Hotwell Road, by the city’s docks. Five weeks later, however, when she had recovered enough to leave the hospital, Jones changed her mind. She now claimed that it had been an accident, that she had not been in her senses at the hospital, and that she was as much to blame as Burston was. She had been drinking with Burston’s wife, who was drunk; when Peter Burston tried to take his wife home, Jones had of-fered to pay for drink so she could stay. Burston had insulted Jones, who waved a flatiron at him; he then struck her with it. Granville was sum-moned as a witness, stating that he thought Jones was in her right mind when she made her accusation. A policeman’s evidence further suggested that Burston had paid Jones to change her story before the matter came to court. Burston was sentenced to a month’s hard labour.61 However the case became more serious when Jones’s condition worsened suddenly; she died a few days later. At the coroner’s inquiry Granville gave the results of his post-mortem, which suggested very serious injuries. The coroner, Mr Joseph Baker Grindon, thought that while the attack was an intentional act, the verdict could not be anything other than manslaughter given that the Burstons and Jones were all friends “and a few moments before… were all joking each other.”62

This case presents us with a number of interesting details about public drinking: the main parties were all friends, and probably neighbours; all of


the witnesses called were members of respectable trades; and the tavern does not sound like it had a bad reputation (although a plain-clothes police-man was in another room of the pub that night, looking for another offend-er). There is also the striking fact that no one thought it worth remarking upon the fact that Jane Jones was ironing in the taproom of a pub. Burston, who had originally been threatened with transportation, seems to have been treated relatively leniently, as he was reminded when he was charged with being drunk and disorderly and attempting to assault a policeman on the Hotwell Road the following year.63 In the hands of a temperance advocate this story would have been the raw material for a powerful lesson, but there was very little moralising from the coroner, or Granville, or any of the other witnesses.

Still, here we have a case of a serious crime that took place in a pub, as-sociated in some way with public drinking (though in a sense this disagree-ment between friends and neighbours bears all the signs of a private dis-agreement), where the state dealt with the criminal through a plainclothes policeman, the Coroner, the courts, and so on. The documents generated by this attention provide the historian with a good deal of material. However, it seems reasonable to suggest that the development and extension of insti-tutions like the Royal Infirmary were making these kinds of drink-related questions more visible. The close reporting of the story would have started much later, in the courtroom, had it not been for Jones’ treatment at the Infirmary. In a sense the extension of public institutions – whether state- or charity-supported – into the lives of more of its citizens also increased the number of ways by which the public might come to know about drink, as well as act upon the problems that were associated with it. On the other hand Granville conducted another four autopsies for the Coroner, who was a near neighbour on the other side of Portland Square, and drink had noth-ing to do with any of these deaths so in some ways the Black Horse killing was an unusual case for him.64

In 1862 Granville became involved in another form of state medicine, as the union medical officer for the Clifton Workhouse (renamed Barton Regis in 1877). This post was one of the commonest roles held by gen-eral practitioners in this period, outside hospital work.65 Granville held this position for about seven months, having given up his connection with the Institute, and drink played its part in his resignation in February 1863. The Guardians queried some of Granville’s purchases: in the thirteenth week of his employment he had ordered fourteen ounces of wine and fifty-two ounces of gin for ninety-nine patients; seven weeks later he ordered 174 ounces of wine and fifty-six ounces of gin for 103 patients, as well as forty-nine pints of beer and thirty-three and a half pints of porter. He was said to have “ordered those stimulants to save his own pocket, as otherwise he would have to purchase tonic medicines.”66 The Guardians refused to increase his salary to cover these expenses and also accused him of be-


ing “equally reckless in ordering mutton and beef for patients”, threaten-ing an increase in the rates.67 Digby has shown that this was a common problem in workhouse medicine, especially where Guardians thought that these medical extras were intended to help hungry paupers, rather than sick ones: “Contests of authority between the doctor and guardians… centred on medical extras, which were suspected by lay administrators of being in aid-of-relief, rather than in-aid-of-sickness.”68

Granville demanded that the Board clarify the charges made against him, but having been through the accounts the Guardians now withdrew their claims of financial impropriety.69 In fact Granville had initially refused to buy beer and porter to treat the Clifton paupers, but he would later argue that alcohol was necessary for health. Discussing food and the treatment of the insane in The Care and Cure of the Insane fifteen years later, he wrote: “Stimulants are, I am convinced, necessary, and I trust the “craze” in fa-vour of teetotalism, which has apparently, for the nonce, warped so many otherwise sound and calm judgements, will not be introduced into asylum management.”70 Granville’s report contained detailed accounts of the drink allowances for inmates in different asylums.

mAkIng IdeAs publIc

It’s clear that Granville felt at home in the public sphere of print, as an edi-tor and journalist, as a letter-writer, and as a popular author. His arguments about drink could be sustained over several years, reaching both ordinary readers as well as other opinion-makers. Print seemed to offer a space for rational and polite interaction between equals, the idealised form of Jurgen Habermas’ public sphere. But it is worth remembering that this was no ra-tional, inclusive exchange of views. While Granville’s popular books sold well, the reviews of his peers were cutting. The Liberal Pall Mall Gazette dismissed Common Mind Troubles as parochial, saying, “this little book would be more useful than it is if all the world centred in Cheltenham or Clifton”, and described a collection of his Globe journalism as “innocuous platitudes [which] might have proved serviceable as “padding” in a third-rate newspaper.”71

Granville also wrote some very odd things, again undermining any sense of a rational exchange of views. For example in 1883 he suggested that more and more people were suffering from bad dreams because of a fashion for sleeping bareheaded; nightcaps kept the head warm and dis-couraged dreaming.72 This provoked humorous comment from Moonshine, which recommended different kinds of nightcaps like the Pitt nightcap for statesmen: “popular opinion foreseen and failure in policy rendered impossible.”73 The following year the paper was able to refer to him as “Dr Mortimer Granville (of night-cap notority) [sic]” when he suggested snuff for those suffering from a cold. Funny Folks went one better by pro-ducing some doggerel listing other “Granville-ite” cures from the reign of


Queen Anne, like wearing a three-cornered hat against toothache.74 In 1885 Granville called for the return of light fur capes, lightly perforated, which were better for the wearer than a heavy overcoat. The tone of the Times leader that followed a week later suggests that the paper and its readers had become grudgingly used to Granville’s sallies: “Dr MORTIMER GRAN-VILLE must at least be admitted to have started a seasonable topic… Now, when the thermometer is galloping up and down, is the moment for the oracles of sanitary reform to propound an ideal supplement to the human skin.”75 Perhaps Granville was the model for Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne’s Sir Faraday Bond, a fashionable doctor who tells the “polite invalids” who consult him to “avoid tea, fried liver, antimonial wine, and bakers’ bread. Retire nightly at 10.45; and clothe yourself (if you please) throughout in hygienic flannel. Externally, the fur of the marten is indicated.”76

It is impossible to establish whether Granville wrote these things to get attention – he was clearly driven to be in the public eye – or believed his own nostrums, but it seems likely that it was for both reasons. He could be very consistent, with the argument about nightcaps being of a piece with his other writings on sleeplessness and other “mind troubles,” for exam-ple.77 When his “thunderbolt” was published, the Pall Mall Gazette noted that it was “calculated to cause a great sensation in the Teetotal Camp.”78 It seems likely that Granville’s dislike of temperance was longstanding and genuine but his calculated intervention would have had other conse-quences, as another paper noted:

Nor will society be likely to keep away from him [Granville] on account of his recent correspondence. On the other hand, it will flock to a medical man who will not cut off their liquor, and presumably also reduce their other en-joyments, as is now the custom of most of our great doctors… Dr Granville will become a most popular doctor after this bold disclosure of his.79

We can, however, tell that these opinions clearly counted against him in the eyes of some readers.

The apparently sober world of the medical press was perhaps no bet-ter than these popular works. M. Jeanne Peterson notes that in the grow-ing sphere of mid-century medical print, “much of what was published and presented to professional audiences had limited scientific value, even by the standards of the day.”80 Elite hospital physicians had the time and economic security to research and publish on particular topics, but were not necessarily the best or the most innovative scientists. While Granville never reached these heights, he was clearly only partly interested in new developments in medicine. In the preface to his gout book he wrote: “Much that may strike the schoolman of to-day as old-fashioned in the views I take, has outlived in my mind the changes of a revolutionary epoch in sci-ence (for I am a Tory in Science as in Politics).”81

In fact Granville presents us with an interesting, and perhaps not atypi-


cal, mixture of science and what Peterson calls “medical entrepreneur-ship.”82 The difficulties of making a living in general practice led many doctors to experiment with other ways of securing an income, including the development of specialist practices like Granville’s Free Institute in Bristol and his research on the nervous system and on gout. Sometimes, though, this specialisation risked accusations of secrecy and quackery, as well as reminding the public that medicine was a trade just as its institutions were trying to recast it as a profession or art. When the British Medical Jour-nal criticised Granville’s “thunderbolt,” one provincial paper noted that the Journal could hardly be more outspoken if it was addressing “some enterprising American quack.”83 For Peterson, “secret remedies violated professional standards of behaviour; in offering a secret remedy, a medical man was acting like a quack.”84 In part this was because the quack did not make their cures publically – i.e. freely – available to all, which as Peterson perceptively points out undermined the medical profession’s authority over both practitioners and patients:

Secret remedies, by their very nature, were not subject to the scrutiny and evaluation of medical colleagues. Equally serious, the power to judge was placed in the hands of the buying public. Pamphlets and books addressed to lay readers appealed to them, rather than their medical man, to judge the virtue of a patent drug.85

This mention of the lay readership for medical knowledge reminds us that much of Granville’s work courted charges of quackery. In 1884 he wrote to the British Medical Journal with a cure for hay-fever, which he would make available to any doctors who wrote to him, but which was also commercially available as a powder from chemists, who he then named.86 Granville’s opinion that port from the wood, rather than the bottle, was good for gout sufferers led to his name being used to advertise port; his inventing and patenting represented other ways of marketing his knowl-edge.87 Peterson is clear that advertising and the development of secret cures and specialist niches were all forms of “medical individualism” designed to secure the practitioner an income in an overcrowded market, and having failed in practice once Granville was presumably desperate to achieve this. He also seems to have sought the authority of association, by becoming a society doctor, rather than the authority that came from presti-gious hospital positions. However, many of these activities were unpopular with more respectable doctors because they made the profession look like a trade; in the medical public sphere the market undermined any attempts at the rational exchange of ideas.88 Parochial, peculiar, conservative and self-serving, Granville’s writings exemplify the fallen state of the nineteenth-century public sphere traced by Habermas, though it makes more sense to measure it not against Habermas’ expectations but against those of Gran-ville’s contemporaries, as suggested in the introduction.


knowIng the publIc One of the concerns of the public sphere is the nature of the public itself and how it can be known; as Crook and O’Hara point out in their chapter on statistics and the public sphere, the main focus of nineteenth-century statistical work was the nature of society or of a population.89 Statistics provided one crucial way of “seeing like a state,” constituting the public as a set of knowable quantities; the census, for example, provided information on vital statistics, what we might now call demography and public health. This information could then be combined with other data and circulated through the public sphere, so that vital statistics played a major role in de-fining important problems (like high urban mortality rates) and their solu-tions (sanitary reform).90 Granville was certainly interested in statistics and was a Fellow of the Statistical Society of London (SSL), but he clearly felt less at home in this world than in medicine.

The year that the Lancet’s report on asylums was published, Granville wrote to the Times to protest against the usual way of calculating mortal-ity (as deaths per 1000). He proposed to use the average age at death as a measure of life expectancy, providing these figures for the major asylums of London, Middlesex, and Surrey as examples.

With the average age at death and the number of deaths it is easy to ascertain how much of the probable life thus estimated has been lost. The percentage of this lost life is, I maintain, the mortality; and by comparing the results of computations so worked it is possible to test the relative value of measures to prolong life, or the deadly tendency of several forms of disease.91

In 1881 he used similar calculations in a letter to the Spectator to argue that the pursuit of sanitary improvement meant only “a prolongation of the passive endurance of life, rather than an extension of the period of true vi-tality, or any increase of the opportunity for good work and real intellectual enjoyment” – a “slower death,” rather than a “longer life.”92 As we will see in a moment, this fitted his argument that temperance might extend life, but lead to more, and longer-lasting, illness. Unfortunately for Granville, the evidence appeared to suggest rather different conclusions about the effects of drinking.

In April 1883 Granville was in the audience at the Statistical Society to hear himself held up as an example of “the line of argument often adopt-ed by those who disbelieve both in death-rates and in sanitation.” Noel Humphreys’ paper, read before the Society, examined the recent decline in the death rate and discussions of its meaning and value, citing Granville’s “remarkable letter” to the Spectator, and its attack on the sanitary move-ment.93 Unfortunately for Granville, William Farr of the General Register Office, a previous President of the Society, had died three days before the meeting, and the seminar was prefaced by a short eulogy of Farr. Granville began his response to Humphreys by saying that “if there was any occasion on which he should be sorry to be regarded by this Society as a representa-


tive of those who disbelieved both in death-rates and in sanitation, it would be at a time when they had just sustained so serious a loss as that involved in the death of Dr. Farr.”94 Even without this unfortunate timing, Gran-ville’s defence would have suffered from his weak grasp of both statistics and demography – which were pointed out to him by the speaker and other members of the audience.95

It is worth reminding ourselves that the public in “public health” also refers to the publically shared discussion of its aims and methods. I am not suggesting that vital statistics operated as a value-free way of establishing social problems and their solutions, but – like the scientific method – sta-tistics provided a shared language and set of assumptions, which could be used to address issues of this kind. This is not Habermas’ rational, neu-tral, public sphere, in other words, but statistics as a form of publicness. As Theodore Porter explains, statistical reasoning allowed the fashioning of both “disciplinary objectivity,” or “an ability to reach consensus,” and “mechanical objectivity,” produced by following rules like peer review which provide “a check on subjectivity.”96 Granville’s refusal to use the measures of mortality that were widely accepted by other statisticians, as well as his apparent inability to understand the technicalities of statisti-cal reasoning, meant that the SSL were unlikely to see either mechanical or disciplinary objectivity in his arguments about health. Granville would later reject the arguments of doctors and actuaries who used the mortality figures of life assurance offices to argue that abstinence was healthier than moderate drinking by saying: “No one who has much to do with statistics, and at the same time mixes in society so that he is not figure-mad, can put his faith in them.”97

Granville’s statistical work sought to constitute the public in two ways. Firstly it made a population visible, in terms of their life expectancy rates. Secondly he invited public discussion of his arguments about the benefits and disadvantages of drinking, or the causes of insanity or other ills, in the seminars at the LSS and in the pages of specialist journals and more widely read newspapers. Granville was less successful with this than he was in carving out a profitable niche for himself in medicine, largely because his arguments lacked both disciplinary and mechanical objectivity in the eyes of the LSS. However he was to have more luck exploring the ways in which individuals were meant to respond to the population-based analyses of statisticians.

the AnxIous publIc

Undaunted by his encounter with hostile statisticians, or perhaps happier writing a letter than he was defending himself in a seminar room, Granville again wrote to the Times to argue that it was pointless to extend the life of the people through public health reforms if those people were more miser-able: “What with cares, and prohibitions, and rules, and cautions we are


kept in a ceaseless agony of carefulness as to what we shall eat and drink and wherewithal we shall be clothed. Our lives are full of fear and sad-ness.”98 This time Punch supplied the comic verse, entitled “The Sorrows Of Sanitation.”99 One provincial paper agreed, “that it is a great deal too much trouble to try to keep well… People are so much beset with infor-mation respecting themselves, and with rules and regulations, and advice, and cautions, and prescriptions, all showing them how to keep themselves in good health.” The writer went on to bemoan “The ceaseless watchful-ness which is imposed on health-seekers or health preservers.”100 Of course Granville had spent much of the last decade providing this kind of informa-tion to the public, but he would go on to explore the contradictions of this in the following decade.

In his 1891 essay in the National Review Granville rejected temperance’s “miserable subterfuge of pledges and vows,” arguing that relying on others to resist the urge to abuse drink was a sign of weakness: “If a man will not obey the instinct of right within him, but resorts to some subterfuge, such as a pledge to some one outside himself, instead of yielding his obedience to self, the energy and conning power of his will are weakened.”101 Tem-perance actually undermined the will necessary to resist the temptation to drink, in other words. Ten years earlier, in How To Make The Best Of Life, Granville had said that resisting temptation

must be achieved by an effort of the will, rather than by humiliating that will by binding its action in the bonds of a “pledge”… The man who can only keep himself in the path of virtue by a chain forged with an oath, does nothing to strengthen his will or confirm his judgement, and is, after all, only the slave of a good despot instead of the victim of a bad and cruel tyrant.102

However that essay insisted that the healthy should drink, which begs the question as to what this willpower was meant to achieve. Granville’s solution to this apparent contradiction was to ask drinkers to ensure that they did not drink more than two ounces of pure alcohol a day. Rather than surrender their will to the pledge, drinkers should draw upon it to drink rationally:

Let drinking be put on a rational basis; let the people be taught how much absolute alcohol they ought to consume in 24 hours – never more than two ounces – and let them be told, or take pains to find out for themselves, pre-cisely how much of absolute alcohol, each favourite beverage contains, and arrange their “drinks” accordingly; and drunken England will be drunken no longer.103

A wine seller named William Hudson informed the Times that this amount-ed to “a bottle of champagne, about a bottle and a quarter of claret, or half a bottle of port or sherry… So your readers can amuse themselves with a very pretty calculation, and drink, if they please, by equation.”104 How-ever Granville suggested that few involved in the sale of alcohol had much understanding of the strength of different drinks and, like Anstie before


him, wanted to educate the public about the alcoholic content of common drinks. Making what seems like an obvious leap to us now, Granville sug-gested that this information should be available on bottles and beer pumps.

A short Act of Parliament, compelling every vendor of wine and beer to state the proportion of absolute alcohol it contains, and rendering it a misdemean-our to sell a bottle not labelled explicitly to this effect, or to supply ale or beer on draught without a printed notice of the same import being affixed to the drawing machine in every bar, would do more to put a stop to drunkenness in this country than any teetotal or temperance movement, however well organ-ized.105

The rational drinker needed to be able to trust these labels, of course. The accidental death by overdose of the famous physicist John Tyndall remind-ed Granville of an unfortunate poisoning case he had experienced in Bristol thirty years earlier, when a mother had mistakenly given her teething child rat poison. Granville had said then that better labelling would prevent these kinds of risks. 106

And yet it does not seem consistent to insist that the individual should be sovereign, rational and well-informed, while also criticising public health advocates for keeping citizens in “a ceaseless agony of carefulness,” as Granville had in 1884. This rational and calculating drinker might also be a rather worried one, in other words, partly because of men like Granville. Ultimately, of course, Granville’s injunction to drink for health was as il-liberal as teetotalism. In 1891 the National Observer said: “The Doctor argued that it is a man’s duty to drink alcohol… which is an absurd propo-sition. The sensible man, who revolts against the slavery imposed by any sort of fanaticism, will not drink alcohol unless he likes it.”107 The problem, as we know very well today, is that it is very hard to encourage citizens to make their own minds up about their drinking while simultaneously telling them how much they should drink.

conclusIons

The life of Granville reminds us that what the public made of drinking in the nineteenth century could be a good deal more varied and unexpected than the usual arguments between temperance and the licensed trade, al-lowing us to trace a number of encounters in which drink became public. It also demonstrates that Granville’s ideas, as peculiar and occasionally contradictory as they might seem, developed steadily over several decades. His “thunderbolt” was not simply a response to the growing attention given to drink by legislators in that decade, for example; it also reflected his experiences as a doctor in Bristol in the 1850s. To return to the questions posed at the beginning of the paper, it may not be possible to evaluate how influential Granville’s ideas were, but it is possible to see that they devel-oped over several decades, addressing amongst other things, the publicness of drink.


Tracing Granville’s engagement with drink also reveals something of the changing nature of this nineteenth-century public sphere. The world of the press and publishing is one obvious place to look for public discussions of drinking, but Granville’s place in this world was necessarily partial, and claims to scientific expertise had to contend with the desire for authority and profit. It is also worth paying attention to the expanding engagement of the state with civil society, which brought drink into view in new ways and prompted new arguments about the role of the state and its relation to its citizens – for example whether the Clifton Poor Law rates should be spent on drink for pauper medicine. The provision of public medicine and sani-tary reform not only made drink visible to the state in ways which had not been possible before, but also made it into a problem that could be tackled through new mechanisms. There were also arguments over the best way to measure the size of this problem, exemplified here by the use of statistics as a form of public knowledge. And finally Granville’s arguments returned to the difficult question of the drinking subject, the public citizen who must be encouraged to make their own decisions about drinking, and to the forms of knowledge that had to be made available so that they could make those decisions rationally.

In all of these ways the life of Mortimer Granville illustrates that public-ness was a key element of nineteenth century discussions of drinking, even when that drinking was not necessarily in public space, and that consider-ing this aspect of the public documents we use as historians can be a valu-able endeavour in its own right.

London, [email protected]

endnotes1. Joseph Mortimer Granville, “Drinking and Drunkenness,” The Times, 15 September

1891; The United Kingdom Alliance was the most influential political temperance organisa-tion in the UK between its founding in 1853 and the early twentieth century. Sir Wilfrid Law-son was its President and Parliamentary leader for more than twenty-five years.

2. The Pall Mall Gazette [editorial] 15 September 1891.3. Hull Daily Mail [editorial] 16 September 1891.4. Reprinted in Evening Telegraph and Star and Sheffield Daily Times [editorial] 16 Sep-

tember 1891. 5. Hull Daily Mail [editorial] 29 September 1891.6. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Third edition (London: Routledge,

2002), 1. 7. James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Se-

cret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago and London: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 2000). See also David N. Livingstone, “Science, Text and Space: thoughts on the geography of reading,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005): 391-401.

8. Simon J. Potter, “Introduction: empire, propaganda and public opinion,” in Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, c.1857-1921, ed. Simon J. Potter (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 11-22, 17.


9. See John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A social theory of the media (Cam-bridge: Polity Press, 1995) on the difference between “mediated interaction” (the letter to a friend) and “mediated quasi-interaction” (a letter written to be printed in the Times, read by countless unknown readers), 85.

10. See for example Lawson’s letter to Vivian, 13 September 1888, Torquay Museum, HP L16 (v) AR 3298.

11. The frontispiece of the Wellcome Library’s copy of Granville’s book Gout in its clini-cal aspects: an outline of the disease and its treatment for practitioners (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1885), carries the inscription “Pardon many slips of the pen and a multitude of misprints,” which might or might not be in Granville’s hand.

12. Clive Barnett, “Convening publics: the parasitical spaces of public action,” in The Sage Handbook of Political Geography, ed. Kevin R. Cox, Murray Low and Jennifer Robinson (London: Sage, 2008), 403-17, 3.

13. James Kneale, “The Place of Drink: Temperance and the public, 1856-1914,” Social and Cultural Geography 2 (2001): 43-59; James Kneale and Shaun French, “Mapping alco-hol: Health, policy and the geographies of problem drinking in Britain,” Drugs: Education, Prevention, and Policy 15 (2008): 233-49.

14. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

15. Hampton, Mark, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950 (Urbana and Chicago: Uni-versity of Illinois Press, 2004), 8.

16. Annemarie McAllister, “Giant alcohol – A worthy opponent for the children of the band of hope,” Drugs: Education, Prevention, And Policy 22 (2015): 103-10.

17. Directed by Tanya Wexler, the film is a loose adaptation of parts of Rachel P. Maines’ The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Bal-timore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

18. Hera Cook, “From Controlling Emotion to Expressing Feelings in Mid-Twentieth-Century England,” Journal of Social History 47 (2014): 627-46; Lee Scrivner, Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Tom Crook, “Norms, forms and beds: Spatializing sleep in Victorian Britain,” Body & Society 14 (2008): 15-35; Shelley Trower, “‘Nerve-Vibration’: Therapeutic Technologies in the 1880s and 1890s,” in Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950, ed. Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 148-63; Alan F. Collins, “Advice for Improving Memory: Exercising, Strengthening, and Cultivating Natural Memory, 1860-1910,” Journal of the His-tory of the Behavioral Sciences 50 (2014): 37-57.

19. Elaine Showalter, “Victorian Women and Insanity,” Victorian Studies 23 (1980): 157-81; Jane Hamlett and Lesley Hoskins, “Comfort in Small Things? Clothing, Control and Agency in County Lunatic Asylums in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England,” Journal of Victorian Culture 18 (2013): 93-114; Andrew Scull, The Insanity of Place/The Place of Insanity: Essays on the History of Psychiatry (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).

20. Wilfrid Lawson, “Publicans And Drunkenness,” The Times, 12 September 1891.21. Joseph Mortimer Granville, “Drinking and Drunkenness,” The Times, 15 September

1891.22. Letters re. “Drinking and Drunkenness” from James Agg-Gardner, The Times, 21 Sep-

tember 1891; Charles R. Drysdale, The Times, 23 September 1891; Frederick Temple, The Western Times, 30 September,1891; Amelia Arnold, The Times, 25 September 1891.

23. “News of the Week” [editorial] Spectator, 19 September 1891.24. “Public Affairs” and “The Drink Controversy” [editorials] The Speaker, 19 September

1891, 331-32 and 337-38; “Revolted Mortimer” [editorial] Punch, 26 September 1891, 153.25. “Drinking and Drunkenness” [editorial] British Medical Journal, 26 September 1891,

702.26. Joseph Mortimer Granville, “‘Drink:’ Ethical Considerations, and Physiological,” The

National Review 18 (1891): 166, 167.


27. Joseph Mortimer Granville, “Drinking And Drunkenness,” The Times, 17 October 1891.

28. Cheryl L. Krasnick, “‘Because there is pain’: Alcoholism, temperance and the Vic-torian physician,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 2 (1985), 1-22; James Kneale and Shaun French, “Moderate drinking before the unit: Medicine and life assurance in Britain and the US c.1860-1930,” Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, 22 (2015), 111-17.

29. “Drinking & Drunkenness. A plea for the use of more alcohol” [editorial] Cheshire Observer, 19 September 1891.

30. William Bramwell Booth [letter] The Times, 22 October 1891; “Dr. Mortimer Gran-ville” [editorial] The British Women’s Temperance Journal, 1 November 1891, 132; “Great Temperance Demonstration” [editorial] Hastings & St. Leonards Observer, 7 November 1891.

31. Joseph Mortimer Granville, “The Archbishop-Designate On Temperance,” The Times, 30 October 1896.

32. Joseph Mortimer Granville, letter to The Western Times, 11 August 1896.33. Reported in the Birmingham Daily Post [editorial] 23 November 23 1893. 34. Joseph Mortimer Granville, “Drinking and Drunkenness,” The Times, 15 September

1891. 35. HO107 / 670 / 53 / 7, Census Returns of England and Wales, 1841. Kew, Surrey, Eng-

land: The National Archives of the UK (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO), 1841.36. “Royal College of Surgeons,” [editorial] The Times, 30 June 1856. 37. The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post [editorial] 25 February 1891; The Medical Direc-

tory For 1891 (London: John Churchill, 1891), 170; Charles John Godfrey Saunders, The Bristol Royal Hospital for Sick Children (Bristol: Board of Governors of the United Bristol Hospitals, 1961), 9. For more on The Free Institute see Martin Gorsky, Patterns of Philan-thropy: Charity and society in nineteenth-century Bristol (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Roches-ter, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 1999), 157.

38. Anne Digby, Making a Medical Living: Doctors and patients in the English market for medicine, 1720-1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 285.

39. Irvine Loudon, Medical Care and the General Practitioner 1750-1850 (Oxford: Clar-endon Press, 1986), 259.

40. The Bristol Mercury [editorial] 4 December 1858; The Morning Post [editorial] 16 April 1861. RG 9 / 1718 / 106 / 28, Census Returns of England and Wales, 1861. Kew, Sur-rey, England: The National Archives of the UK (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO), 1861.

41. The London Gazette [editorial] 21 August 1866, 4659; The London Gazette [editorial] 5 April 1867, 2162.

42. RG10 / 223 / 24 / 6, Census Returns of England and Wales, 1871. Kew, Surrey, Eng-land: The National Archives of the UK (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO), 1871.

43. John Collins Francis, Notes By The Way (London and Leipzig: T. Fisher Unwin, 1909), 181. Sheila Rosenberg, “Some Further Notes on the History of the ‘Globe’: Its Editors, Man-agers, and Proprietors,” Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, 5, No. 1 (1972). J. B. Atlay, The Globe and Traveller Centenary: A sketch of its history (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1903).

44. Frances Collins, Mortimer Collins, his letters and friendships, with some account of his life, Vol. I (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1877), 199.

45. James Murray Cornelius, Sir Stafford Northcote: A political study to 1874 (PhD, Uni-versity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2001), 235.

46. J. Comyns Carr, Some eminent Victorians: personal recollections in the world of art and letters (London: Duckworth & Co., 1908), 28, 34; Francis, Notes By The Way.

47. The Sheffield & Rotherham Independent [editorial] 7 October 1874; “Pins And Nee-dles” [editorial] Judy 14 October 1874, 258; “Dots and Lines” [editorial] Fun 20 (1874), 214.

48. Andrew Wynter, The Borderlands of Insanity and other papers by Andrew Wynter. With Five New Chapters By J. Mortimer Granville (London: Henry Renshaw, 1877).

49. “The Annus Medicus 1900” [editorial] The Lancet, 29 December 1900, 1916; The Pall Mall Gazette [editorial] 18 September 1891.

50. “Report of the Council…” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 39, No. 3


(1876), 445-58. Joseph Mortimer Granville, The Care and Cure of the Insane: Being the Reports of the Lancet Commission on Lunatic Asylums, 1875-6-7, for Middlesex, the City of London, and Surrey (Republished by Permission). (London: Hardwicke & Bogue, 1877); Anon., “Additions to the Library During the Quarter Ended 30th June, 1877,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 40, No. 2 (1877), 330.

51. 1877 (373) Report from the Select Committee on Lunacy Law; together with the pro-ceedings of the committee, minutes of evidence, and appendix (British Parliamentary Papers, 1877), 548.

52. The Sheffield Daily Telegraph [editorial] 30 August 1883; Louisa Lowe, The Bastilles of England, or, The Lunacy Laws at Work (London: Crookenden & Co., 1883), 41-42.

53. Particularly Nerve-vibration and excitation as agents in the treatment of functional dis-order and organic disease (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1883) and Gout in its clinical aspects.

54. Joseph Mortimer Granville, Common Mind Troubles (London: David Bogue, 1878); The Secret of a Clear Head (London: Hardwicke & Bogue, 1879); Sleep and Sleeplessness (London: David Bogue, 1879); Youth: Its care and culture (London: David Bogue, 1880); How To Make The Best Of Life (London: David Bogue, 1881); Minds and Moods: Gossiping papers on mind-management and morals (London: Renshaw, 1878); and Doubts, Difficulties and Doctrines: essays, etc. (London: Ward & Co., 1883).

55. A new thermometer: “Science” [editorial] Westminster review 58 (1880), 268, as well as “a Pocket Pneo-graph; an improved sphygmograph; ‘Percuteurs,’ for Physiological and Therapeutical Purposes; Surface and Differential Cephalic Thermometers; Oculomyometers; the Vibrating Water Bath; &c.,” Medical Directory (1891), 170; Manchester Times [editorial] 7 May 1881; “The Virtue of Mechanical Massage” [editorial] The Review of reviews 43, No. 255 (1911), 320; Nerve-vibration, 15, 18.

56. Rachel P. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm and “Socially Camouflaged Technolo-gies: The Case of the Electromechanical Vibrator,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine (June 1989), 3-23. However Granville’s refusal to treat hysterical men or women because of “the vagaries of the hysterical state” (Nerve-vibration, 56) suggests instead that he might have felt that hysteria was resistant to medicalization, just as he rejected hypnotism as a form of treatment (Joseph Mortimer Granville, “The Craze For Hypnotism,” The Times, 29 May 1890.)

57. Frederic Boase, Modern English Biography, Volume V (D to K, Supplement to Vol II) (1912, reproduced London: Frank Cass & Co., 1965), 478-79.

58. See comments collected in the Appendix, C. Gordon Richardson, Alcohol: A defense of its temperate use (Toronto: National Liberal Temperance Union, 1888).

59. The Pall Mall Gazette [editorial] 18 September 1891.60. See for example “Statement by his Lordship’s physician,” Aberdeen Weekly Journal,

13 January 1887; Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser [editorial] 13 Janu-ary 1887; Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette [editorial] 13 January 1887.

61. “Police Intelligence” [editorial] The Bristol Mercury, 10 September 1859.62. “Manslaughter in Hotwell-Road” [editorial] The Bristol Mercury, 17 September 1859. 63. “Police Intelligence” [editorial] The Bristol Mercury, 25 August 1860.64. Joseph Baker Grindon, Hunt & Co’s Directory of Bristol and S Wales, 1850 (London,

E. Hunt & Co., 1850), 114.65. Anne Digby, The Evolution of British General Practice; Loudon, Medical Care.66. “Clifton Board of Guardians,” The Bristol Mercury [editorial] 14 February 1863.67. Ibid.68. Anne Digby, Pauper Palaces (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 176.69. “Clifton Board of Guardians,” The Bristol Mercury [editorial] 14 February 1863.70. Granville, The Care and Cure of the Insane, 172. Granville was remarkably consistent

in his argument in favour of drinking; the only example I can find where he ruled out the rou-tine prescription of drink or other stimulants is his statement that “the recourse to stimulants in cases of what is called ‘over-work’… must be as pernicious as it is irrational.” Joseph Mor-timer Granville, “‘Change’ as a mental restorative,” The Lancet, 26 June 1880, 992.

71. The Pall Mall Gazette [editorial] 13 January 1879; The Pall Mall Gazette [editorial]


15 July 1873.72. See “Nightcaps” [editorial] The Huddersfield Daily Chronicle, 12 December 1883; and

“RESUME YOUR NIGHTCAPS,” [editorial] The Leeds Times 15 December 1883.73. “In the Name of the Prophet – Nightcaps” [editorial] Moonshine, 29 December 1883,

316. 74. “Seasonable Wish” [editorial] Moonshine, 12 January 1884, 24. “My Banes And My

Queen Anne-Tidotes” [editorial] Funny Folks, 19 January 1884, 19.75. Joseph Mortimer Granville, “Fur Capes, Collars, And Vests Instead Of Overcoats,”

The Times, 24 September 1885. “Overcoats, Capes, and Undercoats,” [editorial] The Times, 3 October 1885.

76. Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, The Wrong Box, Oxford and New York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995 [1889]), 14.

77. Joseph Mortimer Granville, “Position in Sleep,” Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 15 September 1879.

78. “IS TEETOTALISM AN INIQUITY?” [editorial] The Pall Mall Gazette, 15 Septem-ber 1891.

79. The Devon and Exeter Daily Gazette [editorial] 19 September 1891.80. M. Jeanne Peterson, The Medical Profession in Mid-Victorian London (Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 1978), 172.81. Granville, Gout in its clinical aspects, vi.82. Peterson, Medical Profession, 253.83. The Leeds Times [editorial] 3 October 1891.84. Peterson, Medical Profession, 257.85. Peterson, Medical Profession, 259.86. Joseph Mortimer Granville, “Hay-Fever and Hay-Asthma,” British Medical Journal,

21 June 1884, 1230.87. Advert for H. R. Williams, East India Vaults, London, citing Gout in its Clinical As-

pects; The Pall Mall Gazette, 03 December 1890, 4.88. Peterson, Medical Profession, 258.89. Tom Crook and Glen O’Hara, “The ‘Torrent of Numbers:’ Statistics and the Public

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106. Joseph Mortimer Granville, “The Death Of Professor Tyndall,” The Times, 11 Decem-ber 1893; The Bristol Mercury [editorial] 9 November 1861.

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