James Manby Gully - Beliefs and Causes

Beliefs and Causes

Gully was an articulate and popular public speaker and writer. He was also a firm believer in a number of women's causes. He advocated women's suffrage, and preached temperance, due to the detrimental effects of alcohol on the husbands of many Victorian women. Gully built two clinics: Tudor House for men, and Holyrood House for women. He separated the sexes strictly at his clinics, as he believed that many female psychological complaints (depression, anxiety, hypochondria, hysteria) were due to the pressures Victorian women were under to be chaste, ambitionless, efficient, selfless givers, at the expense of their own mental well-being.

While Gully believed in the value of homeopathic medicines in some cases, adding a footnote about his positive experiences with homeopathy to later editions of his water-cure book and stating that "It is well and wise to observe and investigate these things before laughing at them”, he seems to have regarded the use of homeopathic remedies as an adjunct to his use of hydrotherapy, and does not appear to have agreed with the fundamental principles of homeopathy, writing in 1861, "It may shock the homœopathic world when I say that I never much cared for the doctrine of "like curing like"; and that I do not believe it to be of the universal application that they suppose". Like many of his educated contemporaries both in the UK, and in the USA Gully showed an interest in several popular movements of the day, such as women's suffrage, mesmerism and diagnostic clairvoyance. In later life he came to believe in spiritualism, was present at some of the manifestations of "Katie King" with Sir William Crookes and was President of the British Spiritualist Association in 1874.