Dr Granville’s Thunderbolt: Drink and the public in the life of one nineteenth-century doctor

Abstract

In 1891 Dr Joseph Mortimer Granville wrote a series of letters to the Times that amounted to what one commentator described as “a plea for the use of more alcohol.” Though he was denounced by the British Medical Journal, Granville provoked a month-long debate on the merits and dangers of moderate drinking. Granville’s career was highly unorthodox, though common themes emerge from his biography that help explain his arguments for “rational drinking.” He was very much a creature of the developing nineteenth-century public sphere: he had been a hospital and workhouse surgeon; the editor, briefly, of a conservative newspaper, and then a popular medical writer; a statistician using public knowledge to explore social problems and their solutions; and a tireless self-publicist who received both mockery and praise from the satirical press. Granville is almost entirely forgotten now, though he was relatively well known towards the end of his life. However, his ideas remind us that the public’s view of drinking was not solely shaped by the dogmas of temperance and trade, and while he was hardly a typical Victorian doctor, tracing Granville’s engagement with drink also reveals something of the changing nature of the nineteenth-century public sphere.