George Calvert Holland 1801 - 1865
October 02, 2008
George Calvert Holland 1801 - 1865
Lecturer on Physiology at Sheffield Medical
Institution in
1831, Physician Extraordinary to The Sheffield General Infirmary,
formerly President of the Huntarian and Royal Physical Societies
Edinburgh, and Bachelor of Letters of the University of
Paris
in 1843, George Calvert Holland became a homeopath in 1847.
Holland was an influential author and his publications are mentioned frequently in other journals and publications, and he was a very successful orthodox physician, a friend of John James Audubon and Richard Furness, and physician to Joanna Baillie in 1834.
George Calvert Holland resigned his orthodox posts in 1843 and he was declared bankrupt in 1847 when his bank directorships crashed. Holland was a member of the Yorkshire Geological Society in 1849.
In 1847 George Calvert Holland was contributing to homeopathic journals, and he was a colleague and friend of Frederick Hervey Foster Quin and in 1849 his name is listed in The British and Foreign Homeopathic Medical Directory and Record, the British Homeopathic Journal in 1851, and in The British Homeopathic Review in 1859. In 1853, Holland was a member of the Hahnemann Publishing Society.
George Calvert Holland was active in the foundation of the London Homeopathic Hospital, which was established at 32 Golden Square in 1851. He was a was a colleague of Frederick Hervey Foster Quin, the first President of the British Homeopathic Society, and Marmaduke Blake Sampson, the Chairman of the British Homeopathic Association, and many other homeopaths.
In 1858, F A Hartmann and George Calvert Holland were swept up in a scandal when a patient died in Norwich, from a rare condition and a missed diagnosis, an anomalous strangulated hernia, complicated by the intransigence of the allopathic surgeons who refused to consult a patient who was being attended by a homeopath. Compare the account given of this incident in the allopathic press (Anon, The Medical Times and Gazette, Volume 2, (J. & A. Churchill, 1858). Page 423) and in the homeopathic press (John James Drysdale, Robert Ellis Dudgeon, Richard Hughes, John Rutherfurd Russell (Eds.), The British Journal of Homoeopathy, Volume 17, (Groombridge & Sons, 5 Paternoster Row, W H Billing, 19 Castle Street Edinburgh, William Radde, 322 Broadway New York 1859). Pages 161-165)!
George Calvert Holland was also a colleague of William Edward Ayerst, Hugh Cameron, John Chapman, Matthew James Chapman, Edward Charles Chepmell, Paul Francois Curie, William Vallancy Drury, George Napoleon Epps, James Epps, John Epps, James Manby Gully, Edward Hamilton, Richard Hughes, Joseph Kidd, Thomas Robinson Leadam, Victor Massol, J Bell Metcalfe, Samuel Thomas Partridge, Henry Reynolds, John Rutherford Russell, David Wilson, Stephen Yeldham and many others.
At this point, his elder brother placed him under tuition for a Unitarian Ministry, but Holland turned instead to medicine. He went to the University of Edinburgh and then to Paris. As an MD, he practiced in Manchester and began to lecture.
Moving to Sheffield, he began to write and he became a prominent member of Society. Holland became interested in Mesmerism, Phrenology and politics, speaking and writing extensively about the Corn Laws.
By this time, Holland was a wealthy man and a director of the Leeds and West Riding bank and the Sheffield and Retford bank, which unfortunately crashed disastrously, wiping out Holland’s entire fortune. Holland was declared bankrupt in 1847.
He retired to a humble cottage and returned to his writing.
A year later, he was in London and working as a homeopath, and on his return to Sheffield, he became a town councillor, and in 1862, he became an Alderman, but his health was already failing and he died in 1865.
George Calvert Holland was a ’Major Citizen of Sheffield’:
Holland was born in Pitsmoor in 1801. There are conflicting reports as to his father’s occupation, Odom says he was a barber whilst Leader claims he was a saw maker. In any event, George Holland like many of his contemporaries had little formal education. He began to study at the age of sixteen and absorbed himself in Latin, French and Italian.
After being impressed by the ability of one of his friends to write verses he started to write himself and rapidly became competent enough to be a regular contributor to the Poets’ Corner of a local journal.
Nonetheless, it was to the medical profession that Holland was to set his sights. He gained a place at Edinburgh to study medicine and in1827 graduated to M.D. with Honours. He began practice in Manchester and then took up another practice in Sheffield where he was reputed to have earned £1400 per anum. For twelve years, Holland was physician to the Royal Infirmary. He resigned that post in 1843.
Like many of his middle class contemporaries, Holland was involved in many different facets of the town’s life. He was active in the Mechanics’ Library and the Mechanics’ Institute. In 1835 he became President of the Sheffield Literary and Philosophical Society, a position which seemed to have been passed around a select and predictable few who were central to the town’s social circle.
At the S.L.P.S. Holland lectured on a variety of medical subjects and amongst his own personal special studies were consumption, the digestion and Grinders’ diseases.
Poetry was not his only literary pursuit.
He also published the Poetical Works of Richard Furness in 1858 with the fullest biography of the poet available.
However, Holland’s quest to satisfy his intellect was finally his undoing. For during the railway mania of the 1830’s and 1840’s he became so absorbed in the local projects that he almost gave up his medical practices and brought about virtual financial ruin. He took up residence at Wadsley Hall and lived as a gentleman until he was forced out through bankruptcy…
George Calvert Holland did NOT impress Thomas Carlyle:
“I told you once, we must have industrial barons, of a quite new suitable sort; workers loyally related to their taskmasters,—related in God (as we may well say); not related in Mammon alone! This will be the real aristocracy, in place of the sham one; a thing far from us, alas; but infallibly arriving for us;—infallibly, as I think, unless we are to go to wreck altogether.
“This the poor ass Holland has some feeling of, in a most dim manner; and he brays accordingly: “The Corn Law and the Suffrage are by no means the solution of the matter.”
“It seems also your long eared noisy Dr Holland is still going on with his Millocrat; his brayings too, with your original Letter to Fitzwilliam, which provoked the same, I could like to have in full: but this, as far too post heavy in proportion to my impatience, may wait for an opportunity”.
George Calvert’s Obituary is in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1865.
George Calvert Holland wrote The Vital Statistics of Sheffield, The Millocrat, An Inquiry Into the Moral, Social and Intellectual Condition of the Industrious Classes, Diseases of the Lungs from Mechanical Causes, The Constitution of the Animal Creation as Expressed in Structural Appendages, An experimental inquiry into the laws which regulate the phenomena of organic and animal life, An inquiry into the principles and practice of medicine, founded on original physiological investigations, The origin and nature of disease, and the physiological action of auxiliary remedies, in connection with homoeopathic treatment, The philosophy of the moving powers of the blood, The physiology of the foetus, liver, and spleen, Practical suggestions for the prevention of consumption, The nature and cure of consumption, indigestion, scrofula, and nervous affections, Cases illustrative of the cure of consumption and indigestion, The Mortality, Sufferings and Diseases of Grinders, The Mortality, Sufferings, and Diseases of Grinders. Part II Pen-Blade Grinders, An Exposition of Corn-law Repealing Fallacies and Inconsistencies, Suggestions Towards Improving the Present System of Corn-laws__, Letter to J.R. M’Culloch, Esq. in Answer to His Statements on the Corn Laws, Lecture on the Corn-laws, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Treatment of Cholera, An Analysis of the Address of F.H. Fawkes, Esq., to the Landowners of England, The poetical works of … Richard Furness [ed.] with a sketch of his life, The Philosophy of Animated Nature; Or, The Laws and Action of the Nervous … , Practical Views on Nervous Diseases, An Essay on Education, Founded on Phrenological Principles, A Domestic Practice of Homeopathy, The Speeches at a Public Dinner Given to G. Calvert Holland, The Plagiarisms of Julius Jeffreys, F.R.S., in His Treatise on the Statics of the Human Chest.
Of interest:
An E C Holland of Honiton, Devon is mentioned in the British Homeopathic Journal in 1851. Email information from Martin Beavis 26.4.2018: ‘… *Hello Sue - By way of introduction, I’m Martin Beavis and have a family history interest in the homeopath Dr Edward Christopher Holland (1811-1886) who was born and practised in Honiton, Devon from 1835, then in Rochdale from 1852, in Norwich from 1856, and thereafter in Bath. He is the E C Holland who you briefly mention as “of interest”, but of whom you do not elaborate, within your biography of George Calvert Holland, but you have evidently credited GCH with some travails of ECH, for whom you have not yet created a biography. And ECH is far more interesting than GCH. Obituaries of Edward Christopher Holland were published in The Monthly Homoeopathic Review, vol 31, 1886, pages 126-7 & 451 *
*https://archive.org/stream/monthlyhomoeopa15unkngoog#page/n138/mode/2up/search/holland https://archive.org/stream/monthlyhomoeopa15unkngoog#page/n464/mode /2up/search/holland and also in The New England Medical Gazette, vol 22, 1887, page 66 *
https://archive.org/stream/newenglandmedica22bost/newenglandmedica22bost_djvu.txt
*I find no indication that GCH was associated with either Rochdale or Norwich, nor was he related to ECH. So the “Dr Holland” connected with the proposed Rochdale Homeopathic Infirmary and the “Dr Holland” involved in the 1858 scandal in Norwich must both be Edward Christopher Holland, whose experience in Honiton was equally controversial, including bankruptcy, as recorded in The Monthly Journal of Homoeopathy and the Journal of Health and Disease, vol 6, 1850, pages 124-134 & 161-174 *
https://archive.org/stream/monthlyjournalh00unkngoog#page/n144/mode/2up/search/holland https://archive.org/stream/monthlyjournalh00unkngoog#page/n178/mode/2up/search/holland
and mentioned in The British Journal of Homoeopathy, vol 9, 1851, pages 175-176 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JfwEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA527&dq=George+Calvert+Holland&lr=&ei=HTblSMqQI4GmMrGO6BM&redir_esc=y#v=snippet&q=Holland&f=false
Notwithstanding his vicissitudes in Honiton, ECH was much respected within the town with which he retained a connection. In 1867 he was listed in an “Ofsted” review of secondary education as one of the Trustees of Allhallows Grammar School, Honiton. I trust that will enable you to revise your text for George Calvert Holland and create a worthy biography of Edward Christopher Holland. There is a postscript. The wealthy bachelor Colonel Henry Beavis of Barnstaple died in 1826 leaving the annual rents and interest from his estate as a lifetime income to his two grand-daughters, and thereafter to their descendants. Those two sisters were actually the daughters of Henry’s mysterious “adopted” daughter, but that’s another story, as yet unresolved. In the event of the sisters having no heirs, Henry named Edward Christopher Holland, his then 15-year-old first cousin twice removed, as a contingency beneficiary of the whole estate, subject to him changing his name to Beavis and adopting the arms of Beavis. The sisters had no children but one of them lived to the great age of 91, thus outliving Edward such that he never inherited and in 1891 the eventual beneficiary of Henry’s fortune was Edward’s daughter, Eliza Henrietta Hartnell, who was by then the widow of a Cunard sea captain. Eliza duly adopted the Beavis name and Queen Victoria granted her the right to bear the arms of that name, while her children subsequently adopted the Hartnell-Beavis surname. Despite my own surname, I have no direct connection with Henry Beavis; my interest arises from an acquaintance with the widow of ECH’s great-grandson. I should have mentioned that Edward Christopher Holland came from a medical family. Edward Holland I (the first of whom I have found any record) had a son Edward II who was apprenticed in the 1740s to John Hayne, surgeon, of Honiton. In 1765 Edward II married Elizabeth Ewings (a first cousin of Col. Henry Beavis of Barnstaple) with whom he had five children before Elizabeth died in 1774 and his father Edward I died in 1775. Those children included Edward III who also became a practising apothecary but died in 1789, at the age of 19, from a “putrid fever” contracted from one of his patients, having been nursed by his sister Lucy who died of the same a few days later. That might seem a young age but the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries of London has confirmed that a lad apprenticed about 14 might well have been qualified and practising at 19. Another child was Charles Holland who became a (senior?) clerk in the War Office and married in London where his son Edward (IV) Christopher Holland was born in 1811. After Christopher’s death in 1818 the young Edward IV, age 7, went to live at Honiton with his apothecary grandfather Edward II, who must have encouraged IV’s medical studies. and the rest is history. Regards - Martin Beavis...’
Henry Kelsall (?-?) Rochdale’s first non conformist Justice of the Peace, proposed an infirmary in Rochdale, with an amendment from Alderman Robinson for a homeopathic ward to be added to the new institution ‘… *in recognitition of the strong tradition of this medical practice in the town, because of the increased subscriptions that would accrue as a result, and with people obviously more likely to subscribe to an institution that encompassed their specific medical beliefs… The proposal was seconded by Counsellor Hoyle and a stormy debate ensued in which is became obvious that the orthodox medical profession in the town, as represented by Doctors Elliott, March and Wood, objected, at times quite vitriolically. ‘No connection with quacks’ was one of the phrases used by Dr. Wood, a Medical Officer in the Dispensary, at the prospect of homeopaths practicing in the proposed Infirmary. Nevertheless despite these objections the proposal was carried and a pledge of £3650 *[£166,805.00 in today’s money] _taken from the various people present…’ _However, the course of the proposed homeopathic Rochdale Infirmary became mired in the perennial argument between old and new medicine. In Rochdale, the supporters of homeopathy were primarily non conformists, dissenters and Liberalists, and included John Bright, Benjamin Butterworth, Dr. Cox, Thomas Hahnemann Hayle, Dr. Holland, Edward Miall, George Morris, J K Cheetham, and Joseph Seed amongst many others. The Homeopathic Infirmary in Rochdale was never built as a result of all this upset. (From Helen Kelsall, The Development of Voluntary Medical Institutions in Rochdale 1832-1872), Transactions New Series Number 4, (1994, Rochdale Literary and Scientific Society)).