When it comes to quackery, one man stands hands and shoulders above the rest - Edinburgh’s very own ‘Dr’ James Graham.
Here was a man who came from nothing, but thanks to an unshakeable faith in total and utter nonsense, he became, for a time at least, a much sought-after physician.
His is a tale that proves you can achieve anything if you set your mind to it - especially if what you hope to achieve is making money out of rich people by electrocuting their private parts.
Born the son of a saddler in the Grassmarket in 1745, Graham rose from these humble origins to study medicine at Edinburgh University.
Realising it wasn’t strictly necessary to have a medical degree to practice medicine back in the 18 th Century, Graham decided to end his studies early and just call himself ‘Dr. James Graham’ anyway. And to be fair, it doesn't seem to have held him back.
The newly unqualified doctor left Britain for America at the end of the 1760s. While practicing in Philadelphia, he became enthralled by the electrical experiments of Benjamin Franklin and Ebenezer Kinnersely.
It didn’t take Graham long to come to the conclusion that electricity was the cure-all for everything.
“Electricity invigorates the whole body and remedies all physical defects,” he confidently claimed of something that would eventually be used to put people to death.
Graham stayed in America for just over five years, but with revolution in the air in 1775, he decided to take his leave of the troublesome colonies and hightail it back to the safer shores of Britain.
He eventually set up shop in London, taking out advertisements in local newspapers offering electrical treatments for pretty much any ailment one would care to mention. These adverts caught the eye of the famous historian Catherine Macaulay and the Whig politician Horace Walpole, who were only too happy to sing his praises.
With a couple of celebrity endorsements under his belt, it was time to put a plan he’d been working on since his days in the colonies into action. Graham believed electricity could be used in the marital bed, and he was determined to prove it.
In the newly completed Adelphi Buildings in the City of Westminster, Graham constructed what he dubbed the ‘Temple of Health’ in 1780.
The temple was like nothing anyone in London had ever seen before. Consisting of a series of luxuriously decorated rooms, scantily-clad ‘Goddesses of Health’ guided visitors through the temple, inviting them to try out Graham’s ‘medico-electrical apparatus’, as well as offering them the chance to buy the good doctor’s useless elixirs and potions.
Graham himself would give graphic lectures on sex and the benefits of being electrocuted whilst having some bedroom fun.
He also took the opportunity of a paying audience to issue thunderous warning about the dangers of masturbation and prostitution. ‘Free’ electric shocks were given away at the end of each lecture via brass conductors installed in visitors’ seats.
The Temple of Health was such a hit with London high society back in the day that Graham was able to open a second establishment in 1781 in Pall Mall called the ‘Temple of Hymen’.
The crowning glory of this new venture was Graham’s infamous ‘Celestial Bed’.
For the princely sum of £50 (£4,300 in today’s money), couples were led into the temple’s inner sanctum where they attempted to make love under the good doctor’s observation on a ridiculous contraption that Graham insisted practically guaranteed conception.
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Measuring twelve feet long and nine feet wide, the bed was a marvel of modern engineering and a testament to just how far one man could push quackery to its absolute limits.
Intrepid couples lay on a mattress stuffed not only with ‘sweet new wheat or oat straw, mingled with balm, rose leaves, and lavender flowers’, but also with hairs taken from the tails of some of the country’s most famous and virile stallions.
Above them was a mirror suspended from a canopy adorned with automatons, filthy illustrations, fresh flowers and a pair of caged turtle doves. The bed’s headboard - emblazoned with the slogan “Be fruitful, multiply and replenish the earth!” - crackled with static electricity courtesy of currents running through copper coils.
Graham claimed these coils filled the air around the copulating couple with ‘magnetic fluid’ that helped them keep their strength up and boost the woman’s fertility. Beneath the bed, reservoirs filled with expensive oils and perfumes provided the heady scents of the Far East.
If all that wasn’t enough to get the juices flowing, getting down to business on the bed triggered music from a set of organ pipes. The music grew louder the more urgent the lovemaking became.
The bed also tilted at various angles to ensure couples were in the optimum position to improve the chances of successful conception. Though it seems hard to believe now, there were plenty of high society couples willing to give the bed a go in an era when securing an heir was the number one item on an aristocrat’s to-do list.
Despite the Celestial Bed being a big hit with the upper crust, it wasn’t long before Dr. Graham ran into financial difficulties after becoming the subject of ridicule. A campaign launched against him by the Morning Herald saw his rich clients deserted him in droves. On the verge of bankruptcy, Graham left London for Edinburgh in 1773.
Back in his old home town, Graham set up a new Temple of Health on South Bridge.
Unfortunately, the conservatively minded magistrates of Edinburgh were not at all keen on this filthmonger peddling his immorality on the city’s streets. They promptly banned Graham from giving his lewd lectures. In retaliation, Graham published a pamphlet condemning the magistrates for their censorious ways.
This backfired when the magistrates took him to court over the contents of the pamphlet. Thanks entirely to the fact that the same people who had brought the court case against him were the same people who tried the case and delivered the verdict, Graham lost and was fined £20 and imprisoned.
Now officially out of the electric sex temple business, Graham changed tack. He developed a new treatment he dubbed ‘earth bathing’. This involved him giving lectures to the bewildered people of Edinburgh whilst buried up to his neck in soil.
Despite Graham’s claims that his treatment allowed the body to absorb all the nutrients the body required in a similar way to trees, earth bathing didn’t catch on.
By the early 1790s, James Graham struck an increasingly eccentric figure around town. Suffering from religious mania and visions, he was locked away for his own good on a number of occasions. One period of incarceration occurred after he was found striding around the town in the nude having stripped off his clothing to give to the poor.
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As his mental health declined, he also went into the religion business, setting up the New Jerusalem Church in Lochend Close. The church had an enormous congregation of one – Dr. James Graham.
Graham’s final revolutionary treatment proved to be his undoing. Having already taken up the practice of sleeping in the nude with no covers and all his windows open in a city not exactly noted for its balmy Mediterranean nights, he imposed upon himself a strict regime of prolonged fasting.
Graham believed that subjecting the body to long and repeated periods without food or water was the way to live a long and healthy life. He was proved spectacularly wrong when his enfeebled body gave up the ghost in 1794. He was just forty-nine years old.
