Odd this day

23 June 1745

Well… it’s the 279th anniversary of the birth of ‘Dr’ James Graham, who opened a Temple of Health with a £50-a-night Celestial Bed which guaranteed pregnancy — and was later described by the British Medical Journal as “one of the most impudent quacks that ever lived”.

Graham studied medicine in his hometown of Edinburgh, but probably didn’t graduate. He practised medicine, though, to the extent that a 1961 book, The Natural History of Quackery, devoted an entire chapter to him, under the marvellous title, ‘James Graham — Masterquack’.

He started out as an apothecary in Doncaster, went to America and learned about electricity, came back and started treating “valetudinarians who were suffering from newly fashionable ‘nervous disorders’” — or hypochondriacs, to use the technical term.

The placebo effect really is a hell of a drug

He opened his Templum Aesculapium Sacrum, in the riverside Adelphi Buildings in May 1780, “decked out with elaborate electrical machines, jars, conductors… chemical and therapeutic apparatus. Statues, paintings, stained glass windows, music, perfumes…”

You had to pay to see all this, of course, although some accounts say you were also treated to “barely draped young models” as goddesses of health, one of whom might have been Emma Lyon

…later better known as Lady Hamilton

His “magnificent and most powerful Medico-electrical Apparatus” apparently filled ten rooms, and he gave “genuinely libidinous lectures” and sold “Three Great Medicines”: Electrical Ether, Nervous Aetherial Balsam, and Imperial Pills.

The Regeneration of the Body: Sex, Religion and the Sublime in James Graham's Temple of Health and…

He was also a big fan of dousing one’s gonads in cold water at every opportunity.

The main thing, though, was the pregnancy-guaranteeing bed — illustrated here by Tim Hunkin:

It was 12 feet long, 9 feet wide, “supported by forty pillars of brilliant glass of the most exquisite workmanship”, connected up (somehow) to 15 hundredweight of magnets, engraved “Be fruitful, multiply and replenish the earth”, and may have cost as much as £250 a night.

Graham was famed for his looks and charm, but one visitor was unimpressed. Horace Walpole thought him

the most impudent puppet-show of imposition I ever saw, and the mountebank himself the dullest of his profession, except that he makes the spectators pay a crown apiece.

But no one ever went broke underestimating the public’s need to believe in charlatans, especially if they have a gift for marketing. Graham got so famous, there was even a show about him at the Haymarket: The Genius of Nonsense, portraying him as ‘Emperor of the Quacks’.

There was even a satire he’s suspected of having written himself — presumably being an early believer in the idea that all publicity is good publicity

from Roy Porter and Lesley Hall’s ‘The Facts of Life’

There was also this not entirely subtle cartoon of him and rival Gustavus Katterfelto:

He later moved premises to the less posh Pall Mall, although no one can agree whether this was because he was in debt, or the original ‘temple’ couldn’t cope with the crowds. His prices were lower at the new ‘Temple of Hymen’, though, and his property seized in 1782 due to debt.

So, maybe you can go broke underestimating the… etc. He kept going, of course, lecturing, and eventually setting up a new establishment devoted to ‘earth bathing’, where he would lecture buried up to his chin.

In 1911, the British Medical Journal conceded that he had some ideas which stood up to scrutiny. “As far as we know, he was one of the first to preach the gospel of the open window”, for example. There was exercise, cleanliness, and diet — and restraint.

One aspect of such restraint was his opposition to ‘venery’ (aka being a shagger) — Graham was all about fulfilled lives for married couples. So he was also dead against the Very Great Sin of… touching oneself. He went on about it at some length…

every act of self-pollution; is an earthquake — a blast — a deadly paralytic stroke, to all the faculties of both soul and body! striking on an irrecoverable chip from the staff of life; blasting beauty! chilling, contradicting, and enfeebling body, mind and memory! cutting off many years from the natural term of their life! Rather than begin, or continue this vile, soul and body destroying practice — this rebellion against, and murdering of nature, I would advise young persons to anything… indeed, I would seriously advise them at once, to put an end to their existence! for this horridly unnatural — this infernal — this all-blasting practice of self-pollution, and drunkenness, are the inlet to, or the aggregate of all the vices and curses, of soul and body, of time and eternity — bound up in one damning — one more than diabolical bundle

Thanks to all these varied medical therapies, “he claimed to be … in such good health that he would live for 150 years”. Sadly for him, though, he published his last pamphlet in 1793, aged just 47.

Mmm. On reflection, I think this might be a lovely day for a pint.