Adelaide's Protestant dissenting middle class embrace homeopathy as alternative way for public health care

Prominent 19th Century South Australians chief justice Samuel Way and Thomas Magarey, both devout Protestant Dissenter Christians, were among the ardent supporters of homeopathy.
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia

Homeopathy was a strong theme behind South Australian 19^th Century health concerns. In the second half of the 19^th Century, the Adelaide Homeopathic Dispensary was prominent on King William Street next to the Beehive Corner.

Prime mover behind the dispensary was Dr Allan Campbell, who had worked at London Homeopathic Hospital and who also instigated the Adelaide Children’s Hospital. Among ardent homeopathy supporters were premier John Colton and chief justice Samuel Way.

Homeopathy found fertile ground in South Australia for reasons that go back to the colony’s founding as a home for Protestant nonconformist dissent. That background made South Australia well placed to be part of 19^th Century social and medical reform, tying in with religious revival and religious philanthropy.

An Adelaide Protestant middle class group – linked by family, business and church – believed it was their duty to improve the health and welfare’s of the city’s poor. The deadly overcrowding and filth in poorer parts of Adelaide was unavoidable from settlement and in 1867 it was remarked that “the whole town is being built on a foot or two of dung”.

The acceptance of homeopathy among Adelaide’s middle class was boosted by Thomas Magarey who claimed to be cured by its treatment in Melbourne in 1858. Samuel Kidner moved from Melbourne to be Adelaide’s first full-time homeopath and bookseller and stationer E.S. Wigg began selling homeopathic medicines.

But it Allan Campbell’s arrival from England in 1867, when he joined another medically qualified homeopath Dr Henry Wheeler, that elevated the movement to a public health movement to help the poor and raise public awareness.