Carlisle doctors …
In my post on Victorian burials
I mentioned how Dr Henry Lonsdale also spoke about selecting a site for a cemetery. While Dr Thomas Barnes said until Carlisle was effectively sewered and had better burial provisions, the evil of epidemics could never be removed.
Towards the end, I wrote that:
Henry Lonsdale I covered in the ‘temperance and drains’ post.
Dr Thomas Barnes was born in Wigton around 1794 and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. I may well come back to him in a further post.
But with so many other topics calling out to be covered, I hadn’t got around to it.
Until now.
So, courtesy of a 1923 book by Carlisle artist Mary Slee, here is a little more on Carlisle doctors Dr Henry Lonsdale and Dr Thomas Barnes.
Dr Henry Lonsdale (1816-1876)
Born at Carlisle, the son another Henry, Henry Lonsdale started his medical career aged 15 – as an apprentice to two local surgeons. His studies took him to Edinburgh and Paris and he graduated first as a surgeon, then as a physician.
He had a practice at Raughton Head, but returned to the city in 1846 as physician to the Cumberland Infirmary. He was to hold this position for 20 years. It was through this role that he became involved in public health – hence his appearance in the ‘temperance and drains’ post.
Two years before the meeting reported in that post, he had set up a sanitary association in Carlisle.
After his marriage, in 1851, to Elizabeth Indiana Bond, of Rose Hill, he reportedly cut back on public work. However, in 1854, he was still speaking out about health in the city, specifically about the wretched living conditions of local weavers.
Dr Henry Lonsdale is recorded today as much as a writer of biographies as for his ‘day job’. But while I am sure he was rightly proud of his books on such people as the Blamires and Loshes, his efforts to improve public health are what makes him a truly worthy Cumbrian Character.
Dr Thomas Barnes (1793-1872).
Carlisle likewise owes a lot to Dr Thomas Barnes. Born near Wigton, he also began his medical career as an apprentice locally. His studies took him, again, to Edinburgh and France, and Germany.
Mary Slee tells us he
‘had the good fortune to be present at the latter part of the Battle of Waterloo’
I’m not sure why she thought this was ‘good fortune’!
Settling back in Carlisle, he was appointed physician to Carlisle Dispensary. In 1820,he founded Carlisle Fever Hospital, and then the Cumberland Infirmary. It opened in 1842 and he was its first physician.
As well as his efforts to improve public health in the city, he also had other interests. He wrote papers On the Meteorology of Carlisle. And after retiring from medical practice, he was a magistrate.
Dr Robert Elliot (1811-1882)
Carlisle’s first Medical Officer for Health hasn’t featured in Cumbrian Characters yet. But as Mary Slee records, he was:
‘celebrated as a sanitarian and philanthropist’
Hailing from a medical family, he studied at Edinburgh, Paris and Heidelberg.
1861 shows him, aged 50, in Lowther Street with wife Eliza (Dobinson), 37, four young children, a young nephew, and six servants. Two more children followed, and he, too, became a magistrate. He also served as a coroner, and in 1855 as the city mayor.
His obituary in the Carlisle Journal describes his many efforts to promote and improve public health. It also says he was largely responsible for the founding of Working Men’s Reading Rooms in Carlisle.
Mary Slee, (1869-1943)
The artist who drew the pictures of the three Carlisle doctors was the daughter of Benjamin Slee and Jane (Glaister). Her mother died when Mary was just 11. Benjamin was a ‘master painter’ but 1871 shows he was a ‘painter and glazier, employing 5 men, 4 boys’. So a solid tradesman, but not ‘that sort’ of painter.
At 22, Mary was boarding with a grocer and his wife in Deptford, London/Kent. But she returned to Carlisle as an art teacher.
The Museum of London has a postcard “Women’s Emancipation, Justice, Truth, Equity and Comradeship”, produced for the pro-women’s suffrage campaign, ‘artist Mary Slee’.
National Galleries Scotland has a portrait by Mary Slee of Carlisle-born artist Samuel Bough (1822-1878), as a young man.
Samuel Bough painted (among other works) The Solway at Port Carlisle (1859).
Sadly, no one seems to have painted a picture of Mary.