23 January 1888: Dr Henry Arthur Allbutt of Leeds launches a crowdfunder after being struck off for publishing a cheap obstetrics and gynaecology manual for women
Henry Arthur Allbutt. 1888. The Wife’s Handbook, 7th Ed. London: R. Forder. Get it:
.Unedited excerpt
If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.
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.
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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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- Abortifacient (2) W/G ·
- Abortion (4) W/G ·
- 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 W/G ·
- Besant, Annie (1) W/G ·
- Birth control (2) W/G ·
- Bradlaugh, Charles (1) W/G ·
- Crowdfunding (1) W/G ·
- Family planning (1) W/G ·
- Feminism (6) W/G ·
- General Medical Council (1) W/G ·
- Gynaecology (2) W/G ·
- Infant mortality (2) W/G ·
- Infant (5) W/G ·
- Knowlton, Charles (1) W/G ·
- 📌Leeds (249) W/G ·
- London (84) W/G ·
- Malthusian League (1) W/G ·
- Malthusianism (2) W/G ·
- Medical ethics (1) W/G ·
- Medical license (1) W/G ·
- Menstruation (1) W/G ·
- Obscene Publications Act 1857 (1) W/G ·
- Obstetrics (2) W/G ·
- Pregnancy (9) W/G ·
- Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (1) W/G ·
- Unintended pregnancy (3) W/G ·
- Watts, Charles (1), secularist W/G ·
- Women’s rights (4) W/G ·
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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Reproduction by kind permission of Michael Paraskos.20 December 1966: Greek-Cypriot cook and artist Stass Paraskos appears before Leeds magistrates charged with obscenity under the Vagrancy Act 1838
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The Times establishes the date, but curiously doesn’t mention the better-known experts:
Mr John Edward Jones, a lecturer in painting in the fine art department of Leeds University, giving evidence at Leeds Magistrates’ Court yesterday in the case in which two pictures were alleged by the prosecution to be obscene, said that the work of the artist was “gentle, tender, honest, poetic and lyrical.” He was a witness called on behalf of the artist, Stassinos Paraskos, aged 33, of Lucas Street, Leeds, who had pleaded Not Guilty to two summonses. The first alleged that on April 28 last he wilfully exposed to view in a public place, the Leeds Institute of Art, an obscene picture, a coloured picture entitled “Lost Love”, under section four of the Vagrancy Act 1824 as amended. The second summons alleged that on the same date he exposed to view in the same place an obscene picture, a drawing signed “Stass” dated July 2, 1965. Paraskos was found Guilty on both counts. He was fined £5 on each and was ordered to pay costs not exceeding 10 guineas on each [total ca. £320 in December 2023]. An appeal is being considered (Times 1966/12/21).
Bruce Douglas-Mann in The Spectator, focussing on two contemporary London cases, agrees with The Times that the hearing only took place on one day and mentions nine expert witnesses:
It is not commercialised sex, however, which seems to get prosecuted, but works by serious artists and by writers who are trying to communicate something of significance… It would not be too difficult for those who want to tell us what we may be allowed to read to find magistrates who are known to have little sympathy with modern trends in literature and art, and to ensure that the right to trial by jury is excluded. With books there is at least the right to call evidence of literary merit; when pictures are attacked, despite the intentions of Parliament expressed in the Obscene Publications Act, the defence of artistic merit may be dismissed as irrelevant. Eight distinguished art critics had voluntarily agreed to give evidence of artistic merit in the Robert Fraser case. Six of them spent a fruitless afternoon in court. As the prosecution had chosen to proceed under the Vagrancy Act, the defence of artistic merit was excluded…
Each of these cases shows some disturbing and unsatisfactory features of the law on censorship and the manner of prosecution. Taken together they must cause serious concern, not just to the few who are upset by any individual case, but to anyone who does not wish all his art and literature sifted with every ‘distasteful’ feature of life as it is removed before it reaches us.
A private group of censors with money behind them already exists, as the Last Exit case showed. Sir Cyril was not acting alone. At least one other Tory MP successfully claimed the right to sit behind counsel on the ground that he was ‘behind the prosecution.’ If such a group is allowed loose in our libraries and galleries, and, by operating under antique laws, to exclude the defences that Parliament intended, we may come to recognise Dr Bowdler as an amateur (Douglas-Mann 1966/12/30).
The Vagrancy Act 1838 (1 & 2 Vict. c. 38) was an Act of Parliament in the United Kingdom. It amended the Vagrancy Act 1824 to provide that any person discharged from custody pending an appeal against a conviction under that Act who did not then reappear to prosecute the appeal could be recommitted. It also provided that the penalty established by that Act for exposing indecent prints in a street or highway would extend to those who exposed the same material in any part of a shop or house.[2]
This latter part of the Act was to prove significant in a number of prosecutions of artists for allegedly exhibiting obscene works of art, even when those exhibitions took place in a private space such as an art gallery. One of the most notorious successful prosecutions of an artist under the act was in 1929, when thirteen paintings by D. H. Lawrence at the Warren Gallery, London, were seized by the police. A ban was placed on the paintings being shown in England, which is technically still in force, but they were shown again in London in December 2003.[3]
The last artist to be successfully prosecuted under the 1838 Act was Stass Paraskos in 1966, following a police raid on an exhibition of Paraskos’s work at Leeds College of Art. Again a ban was placed on showing the offending paintings and drawings in England, which is also still legally valid. However one of the paintings was shown at Leeds City Art Gallery in 1993,[4] and again at Scarborough Art Gallery in 2000, and several others are now owned by the Tate Gallery, London.[5] In 1969 a total of 35 people were prosecuted under section 2 of the Act and section 4 of the 1824 Act for acts of public display of obscene images in shop windows and exhibitionism.
Although aspects of the Act had been repealed in a piecemeal fashion by subsequent legislation, the full Act was formally repealed in 1981 by the Indecent Displays (Control) Act 1981 (c. 42), partly due to the lack of clarity in distinguishing between indecency and obscenity. [6] For example the advertising of contraceptives was considered obscene from 1857, but fell under the ambit of the new act of 1981.
A great introduction to the man by his son, Michael Paraskos:
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