Gully, James Manby

Dictionary of National Biography entry on James Manby Gully (1808-1883), fetched directly from Wikisource on 2026-08-02. States he was born 14 March 1808 at Kingston, Jamaica, son of a coffee planter; educated at Edinburgh and Paris (M.D. Edinburgh 1829); established as a London physician in 1830; met James Wilson c. 1837; both agreed conventional medication was ineffective and potentially harmful; in 1842 Wilson returned from the Continent convinced of hydropathy's power and the pair settled at Malvern. States Gully was the more commercially successful of the two, resigned his practice in 1872 to his partner William T. Fernie, and that in 1876 Gully's name was mentioned repeatedly at the inquest into the poisoning death of the barrister Charles Bravo, whose wife was suspected; disclosures of Gully's intimacy with Mrs Bravo severely damaged his reputation, and at the inquest's conclusion his name was struck from every medical society and journal of the day. Records his death on 27 March 1883, and lists his major publications including The Water Cure in Chronic Disease (1846, nine editions) and A Guide to Domestic Hydrotherapeia (1863; 2nd ed. 1869).