George Dunn 1803 - 1886
May 17, 2009
George Dunn 1803 - 1886 LRCS
Edin. 1831, LSA 1833, MD Edin. 1848
MBHS, was the
Founder and Senior
Physician at the St
James’s Homeopathic
Hospital
in Doncaster,
Medical
Officer
of the Great Northern Railway, Consulting
Physician
to the York Homeopathic
Dispensary,
Secretary
of the Northern Homeopathic Medical
Association,
Member of the Provincial Medical
Council
of the London Homeopathic
Hospital,
Member
of the British Homeopathic
Society,
George Dunn was the Senior Physician at the the St James’s Homeopathic Hospital in Doncaster, in the 1850s, and he was elected Mayor of Doncaster in 1857, due to his services to the town,
George Dunn was the homeopathic practitioner of John Pocock of Cape Town 1814-1876,
From http://www.homeoint.org/morrell/british/hall.htm ‘… George Dunn, LRCS Edin. 1831, LSA 1833, MD Edin. 1848 MBHS,… was the founder of the St James’s Homeopathic Hospital in Doncaster [Doncaster Homeopathic Dispensary (in 1853), ‘20 beds in militia, 6000 outpatients, small Turkish bath on premises.’…
In due course the hospital was built and opened in January 1853. Dr. Dunn was a homeopath and treated all his patients using Samuel Hahnemann’s system. This attracted some ridicule amongst other doctors in the town, who called him a ‘medical heretic’.
Dr. Dunn went on to become a Borough Magistrate and the Mayor of Doncaster in 1857, but the grandly styled hospital he founded soon closed and was sold off in the 1880s. It was a YMCA building for many years before being demolished in 1963.
In the 1851 census for the town George Dunn is listed, aged 47, a native of Barnsley, with his sister Eliza 42, unmarried, his wife Sarah 40, five daughters ages 1-10 years and one son aged 1.
He left the town c.1875, to travel the world (visiting India), and died of apoplexy in Hastings, New Zealand in 1886. I am indebted to the Doncaster Metropolitan Library for an article about Dr. Dunn and the Homeopathic Dispensary and also a copy of his entry in the Census of 1851.
Spencer Timothy Hall and George Dunn provide one of the earliest and best examples of a doctor teaching a lay practitioner who then went on to qualify on the continent and in the USA in homeopathy. There must have been dozens of other instances in the nineteenth century of this type of training, and several hundred such semi-qualified practitioners of Eclectic, Thompsonian, Botanic and homeopathic medicine practising in the 1850-90 period in the UK as a whole. None of them were eligible for Registration under the 1858 Medical Act, which wrote them all off as quacks…
George Dunn attended the British Congress of Homeopathic Practitioners in Manchester in 1853,
George Dunn attended (Anon, The Homeopathic World, Volume 43, (1908). Page 236) the 2nd International Homeopathic Congress held in London (Anon, The Medical Counselor, Volume 7, (The Michigan State Homeopathic Society, 1883). Page 347) in on 11th-18th July 1881 (Anon, The Homeopathic World, (August 1,1881)) at Aberdeen House, Argyll Street, Regent Street.
George Dunn’s Obituary is in The Clinique Volume 7 in 1886,
George Dunn submitted cases and articles to various homeopathic publications, including Advantages of Homeopathy in the Practice of Surgery,
Of interest:
Mary Dunn, wife of Daniel Dunn, parents of George Dunn?, involved in the preparation of homeopathic cocoa. Her Obituary is in The British Homeopathic Review in 1885.
Walter Hahnemann Dunn, son of George Dunn, Walter Hahnemann Dunn also attended (Anon, The Homeopathic World, Volume 43, (1908). Page 236) the 5th annual International Homeopathic Congress held in London (Anon, The Medical Counselor, Volume 7, (The Michigan State Homeopathic Society, 1883). Page 347) in on 11th-18th July 1881 (Anon, The Homeopathic World, (August 1,1881)) at Aberdeen House, Argyll Street, Regent Street.