Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

The Wife’s Handbook has never been attacked in any court of law, and I deny the right of thirty-two medical gentlemen to stigmatise the book as “indecent,” “immoral,” “unprofessional,” etc., simply because it is so low in price. The truth is this — the heads of the medical profession in England are opposed to cheap medical knowledge for the people. They like to keep the poor hard-working man and woman in ignorance of certain important facts. They do not like a poor married woman to know the means by which she can keep from the workhouse by having only as many children as she can bring up in comfort. Knowledge may be all right for the rich lady who can afford to buy a guinea medical book and pay a big fee to a doctor, but it is an offence of an infamous character for a physician to write and sell a book at sixpence showing the poor how to better their hard lot. For trying to do my duty to my married countrywomen I have been branded as “infamous.” I have been excommunicated from medical society, and have been put to enormous expense. My book has been pronounced by clergymen, leading physicians, philanthropists, and by many public newspapers, as highly moral and as a great boon to the working classes. I would therefore ask every reader of The Wife’s Handbook to help me in my fight against bigotry, ignorance and injustice. I ask them to help me to remove the slur cast by the General Medical Council on the virtue of the working women of this land. I appeal to them to leave no stone unturned until the right of every poor person to necessary medical knowledge has become an admitted fact, and the necessity of all married women knowing how to regulate their children to their means a highly moral — nay, even a religious duty. This can only be done by helping me to regain my rights. I have fought the battle of the working classes and have lost. I now require victory. The cost of appeal, and may be application to Parliament, will probably be £300. If each of you will send a small sum, only as much as you can afford, you will enable me to emerge from this conflict I trust victorious. Each of you I ask, in the name of justice and humanity, to contribute what you can at once. Even a few pence from every one will vastly help.

Comment

Comment

Has anyone got a digital copy of the same author’s The Trial of Dr. Henry Arthur Allbutt, of Leeds, by the General Medical Council of Great Britain and Ireland, at 299, Oxford Street, London, on November 23rd, 24th, and 25th, 1887, for the Publication of “The Wife’s Handbook” at So Low a Price? I haven’t seen press reports of the hearing.

There’s not as much discussion of Allbutt as I expected (I don’t even know his dates), but this is interesting. He strikes me as neo-Malthusian, hence the tag. Is anyone now prepared to call him a progressive? How about a blue plaque at 24 Park Square?

In mail, David Gahan wonders whether there’s a family tie to a famous local medical namesake, Clifford Allbutt. In his blog he points to our Allbutt’s predecessors, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, who were unsuccessfully prosecuted in 1877 for republishing Charles Knowlton’s 40-year-old Fruits of Philosophy, a sexuality and birth-control pamphlet; and to slightly later Oxonian colleague of our Allbutt, Dr Holmes of Hanney.

Perhaps Ancestry is the only way of investigating any Clifford connection. In his biography, Humphry Rolleston writes:

This short life of a great personality was undertaken, at the wish of Lady Allbutt, with considerable anxiety; for not only has it been said that it is as difficult to write as to live a good life, but full materials for an accurate account of Sir Clifford Allbutt’s activities, extending over wide fields and many years, have not been ready to hand. He kept very few letters, did not write a diary, or leave any unpublished reminiscences, and very few of his early contemporaries are now alive (Rolleston 1929).

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Original

AN APPEAL

Dear Friends, — For the last ten months I have been persecuted, firstly by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and secondly by the General Medical Council of Great Britain. The attack made by the College came to nothing, as much public opinion was brought to bear in my favor on the Fellows of the College. The attack made by the General Medical Council, sitting at 299, Oxford Street, London, terminated on November 25th, and I had the sentence passed upon me by the Council (who voted in secret) that my name be erased from the Medical Register, and that I be “judged guilty of infamous (!!!) conduct in a professional respect” for having published and publicly sold “The Wife’s Handbook” at too low a price.

Against this cruel and unjust sentence I propose to appeal in the Law Courts. I intend, if there is justice, to obtain a reversal of a sentence which not only casts a slur on my name, but is a direct insult to the intelligence of every working man and woman in the country.

“The Wife’s Handbook” has never been attacked in any court of law, and I deny the right of thirty-two medical gentlemen to stigmatise the book as “indecent,” “immoral,” “unprofessional,” &c., simply because it is so low in price.

The truth is this — the heads of the medical profession in England are opposed to cheap medical knowledge for the people. They like to keep the poor hard-working man and woman in ignorance of certain important facts. They do not like a poor married woman to know the means by which she can keep from the workhouse by having only as many children as she can bring up in comfort. Knowledge may be all right for the rich lady who can afford to buy a guinea medical book and pay a big fee to a doctor, but it is an offence of an infamous character for a physician to write and sell a book at sixpence showing the poor how to better their hard lot.

It is for you, dear friends, I wrote the little “Wife’s Handbook.” I wanted the poor wife to understand many of those private matters so necessary for her well-being. I desired she should have good health, common sense, comfort, and true happiness. I wished her children to be healthy, upright, and moral. I wanted her husband to find in her all the characteristics of a really good wife. I inculcated temperance, purity and self-reliance.

For trying to do my duty to my married countrywomen I have been branded as “infamous.” I have been excommunicated from medical society, and have been put to enormous expense. My book has been pronounced by clergymen, leading physicians, philanthropists, and by many public newspapers, as highly moral and as a great boon to the working classes. I would therefore ask every reader of “The Wife’s Handbook” to help me in my fight against bigotry, ignorance and injustice. I ask them to help me to remove the slur cast by the General Medical Council on the virtue of the working women of this land. I appeal to them to leave no stone unturned until the right of every poor person to necessary medical knowledge has become an admitted fact, and the necessity of all married women knowing how to regulate their children to their means a highly moral — nay, even a religious duty.

This can only be done by helping me to regain my rights. I have fought the battle of the working classes and have lost. I now require victory. The cost of appeal, and may be application to Parliament, will probably be £300. If each of you will send a small sum, only as much as you can afford, you will enable me to emerge from this conflict I trust victorious. Each of you I ask, in the name of justice and humanity, to contribute what you can at once. Even a few pence from every one will vastly help.

Contributions can be sent to me at 24, Park Square, Leeds; or to W. H. Reynolds, Esq., Camplin House, New Cross, London, S.E.

I am, dear friends, yours sincerely,

H. A. ALLBUTT, M.R.C.P.E., L.S.A. Lond.

24, Park Square, Leeds, Jan. 23rd, 1888.

741 words.

Tags

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• Abortifacient (2) ·
• Abortion (4) ·
• Allbutt, Clifford (1836-1925) (22), Dewsbury-born physician (Leeds Infirmary 1861-89), inventor of the clinical thermometer, Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge 1892-his death ·
• Besant, Annie (1) ·
• Birth control (2) ·
• Bradlaugh, Charles (1) ·
• Crowdfunding (1) ·
• Family planning (1) ·
• General Medical Council (1) ·
• Gynaecology (2) ·
• Infant mortality (2) ·
• Infant (5) ·
• Knowlton, Charles (1) ·
• 📌Leeds (235) ·
• London (74) ·
• Malthusian League (1) ·
• Malthusianism (2) ·
• Medical ethics (1) ·
• Medical license (1) ·
• Menstruation (1) ·
• Obscene Publications Act 1857 (1) ·
• Obstetrics (2) ·
• Pregnancy (9) ·
• Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (1) ·
• Unintended pregnancy (3) ·
• Watts, Charles (1), secularist ·
• Women’s rights (4) ·

All tags.

Similar

• 2 June 1867: Dr Clifford Allbutt tells the Epidemiological Society that the market will not provide decent housing for Leeds’s poorest
• 4 May 1913: Leonora Cohen, Hunslet’s celebrated window-breaking suffragette, tells a May Day meeting on Woodhouse Moor, Leeds, that arson is required to gain the vote
• 18 August 1889: Eight survivors of prostate surgery present themselves to a meeting of the BMA in Leeds
• 21 August 1774: Emanuel Bowes returns to Captain John Bolton’s house in Bulmer before his master has finished disposing of his pregnant fellow-apprentice, Elizabeth Rainbow (16)
• 20 June 1817: Lines spoken by the actor Alexander Cummins at the Leeds Theatre are enacted sooner than he might have wished
• 15 March 1586: Offered a jury acquittal, Margaret Clitherow of York, concealer of priests, chooses martyrdom and is crushed under her own front door
• 16 February 1886: Clifford Allbutt explains to James Crichton-Browne why three years later he was to trade a lucrative medical consulting career in Leeds for a less well paid Commissionership in Lunacy in London
• 2 June 1917: Olive Mallet and her lover Alfred Gorham are charged with falsely claiming benefits for poisoning she suffered at Barnbow munitions factory (Leeds)
• 6 April 1821: At the opening of the hall of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, the surgeon Charles Turner Thackrah bids the town repay its debt to knowledge
• 9 July 1903: Clifford Allbutt, late of Leeds, tells a Bradford sanitary congress to reject the view that (preventive) medicine is antagonistic to the survival of the fittest