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Bloomsbury Institutions

Medical

British College of Health

Also known as Society of Hygeists

History

It began in 1825 as a campaign conducted by James Morison to assert the importance of the blood; he believed that all diseases were caused by its impurity, and therefore urged the necessity of purging it with vegetables, with his own specially-developed Vegetable Pill (John Malcolm Bulloch, The Centenary of James Morison the “Hygeist”, 1925)

Originally, Morison gave away his Pill, but he found that no-one appreciated it when it was free, so instead he turned to selling it through specially appointed agents (John Malcolm Bulloch, The Centenary of James Morison the “Hygeist”, 1925)

Morison subsequently built the British College of Health to sell his products in partnership with Thomas Moat (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

Its grandiose name was described as “one of the cleverest things he ever did…by taking on a sort of corporate philanthropic existence he removed himself from the category of a mere commercial exploiter of a proprietary medicine” and created “a sort of University of Morisonism” (John Malcolm Bulloch, The Centenary of James Morison the “Hygeist”, 1925)

He also published a journal, the Hygeian Journal

In the early 1830s, his annual turnover in Britain was thought to be around £100,000 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

He conducted a reciprocal campaign against orthodox doctors, led by Thomas Wakley of The Lancet, but after a series of deaths attributed to overdoses of his pills, Morison left England in 1834 for Paris; a decline in sales followed (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

One of the cases was Morison and others v. Harmer and another (The Times, 11 and 13 February 1837)

However, there was clearly a continuing market for the medicine; in 1837, Morison had to advertise that his Pill was sold only through his agents and had the red and white “Morison’s Universal Medicines” logo, as many imitations were then on the market, such as “Dr Morrisons Pills”, “The Hygeian Pills”, and “The Original Morison’s Pills, as compounded by the late Mr Moat” (The Times, 20 April 1838)

It was thriving again in the 1840s; in 1840–1849 it paid £115,000, meaning that it had sold 18,400,000 stamps or 828,000,000 pills, while another 1.5 million had been distributed to the poor (John Malcolm Bulloch, The Centenary of James Morison the “Hygeist”, 1925)

A book published by the College contained a collection of letters of recommendation from patients, dating from the early 1830s to 1869, and claiming his Pill as a cure for stomach complaints, cholera, liver complaints, general debility, jaundice, worms, gravel, limb pain after falls, and eye problems; they were even being used to treat snake bits and scorpion stings in Madras in 1866 (Guide to Health: Being a Collection of Cases of Cure Effected by Morison’s Pills (The Vegetable Universal Medicine) during the Last Forty Years, published by the College, undated)

Many patients were apparently continuing to take his Pill even when they had been cured, and some were giving them to the rest of the family as a preventative medicine with no side effects; others were taking or administering his Pill secretly because of their controversial reputation (Guide to Health: Being a Collection of Cases of Cure Effected by Morison’s Pills (The Vegetable Universal Medicine) during the Last Forty Years, published by the College, undated)

Advertisements for the product were printed in many languages including Chinese and Arabic, and the Pills reached many foreign countries; in Krakow, Poland, in 1844, one J. T. Fischer was arrested for taking the tablets, but proved he had been cured and was discharged by the court (Guide to Health: Being a Collection of Cases of Cure Effected by Morison’s Pills (The Vegetable Universal Medicine) during the Last Forty Years, published by the College, undated)

After Morison’s death in 1840, his son James Augustus Cotter Morison, journalist, historian, and Positivist, apparently did little to interfere with the running of the family firm (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

In 1843 Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (the book in which the term ‘the condition of England’ was coined) has a chapter called Morrison’s[sic] Pill, in which he says “Brothers, I am sorry I have got no Morrison’s[sic] Pill for curing the maladies of Society”

Another satirical reference came from Robert Wilkie’s one act farce Yalla Gaiters, or a Rare Discovery on the Banks of the Moy, published in 1840 and acted in 1846, which summed up the grandiose claims made for the Pill thus:

“In short, the blind may gain their sight, the dumb may find a tongue,
The lame may quickly run a race, the old again be young.
One dose will make you laugh or cry and every belly fills,
In fact if you would never die take Vegetable Pills”
(quoted in John Malcolm Bulloch, The Centenary of James Morison the “Hygeist”, 1925)

In 1856, Dickens referred satirically to “the august members of the Hygeian Council of the British College of Health” and “that great discovery, Morrison’s[sic] pills” (Household Words, 11 October 1856)

John Morison, another son of James, published a letter defending the College and opposing vaccination in The Cosmopolitan (6 April 1871); he also published other anti-vaccination pamphlets in the 1870s under the imprint of the Society of Hygeists

In 1862 Punch satirised the “great candour” with which Morison advertised the fact that his pill contained the poison henbane (Punch, 3 May 1862)

In the early twentieth century, the different Pills (there were no. 1 pills and no. 2 pills, as well as a vegetable aperient powder) were subjected to chemical analysis; the no. 1 pills were found to contain aloes, tartaric acid, and senna, while no. 2 comprised colocynth, gamboge, rhubarb, and myrrh (Pharmaceutical Journal, 3 August 1901)

This was possibly the same composition as Anderson’s Pills and Bontius’s Pills, but what was different was the dosage; about 20–30 pills was the standard dose of Morison’s Pills, which was a much higher quantity than the other products (Pharmaceutical Journal, 3 August 1901)

The company moved out of 33 Euston Road in 1916 but continued to make pills at Percy Circus, King’s Cross Road (John Malcolm Bulloch, The Centenary of James Morison the “Hygeist”, 1925)

At the time it was still being run by a descendant of its founder, Margaret Jessie Cotter Ludby, daughter of Mrs Helen Ludby, who was the daughter of James Augustus Cotter Morrison; she was still running the business in the 1920s (John Malcolm Bulloch, The Centenary of James Morison the “Hygeist”, 1925)

In the 1920s, the vegetable pills were in the news again, partly because of the centenary of their foundation, but also “because the proposed widening of Euston Road threatens the strange monument, surmounted by a couchant British lion, which was erected by penny subscriptions in 1856 in the now derelict garden in front of his famous ‘British College of Health’ ” (John Malcolm Bulloch, The Centenary of James Morison the “Hygeist”, 1925)

Not only the monument but the College building itself (which had become a Salvation Army hostel) was demolished in 1928 when Euston Road was widened (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, entry for James Morison)

It no longer exists

What was reforming about it?

Nothing; it was a resolutely non-medical, commercial product whose factory bore a name suggesting medical education, associated with a professional-sounding society

Despite this, its publicity maintained that there were many “striking instances in which Mr Morison anticipated some of the most recent and tardy results of medical science”, including his denouncements of bleeding, inoculation, and the treatment of cholera by constipation instead of his recommended method, purging (Guide to Health: Being a Collection of Cases of Cure Effected by Morison’s Pills (The Vegetable Universal Medicine) during the Last Forty Years, published by the College, undated)

Where in Bloomsbury

Morison’s first factory was in Claremont Place, possibly on the corner with Judd Street; he may have continued to use these premises even after the building of the College nearby (John Malcolm Bulloch, The Centenary of James Morison the “Hygeist”, 1925)

In 1828 the new College building opened at Hamilton Place, New Road, later known as 33 Euston Road; the pills continued to be manufactured on the premises (John Malcolm Bulloch, The Centenary of James Morison the “Hygeist”, 1925)

The company left 33 Euston Road in 1916 but moved only the short distance to Percy Circus, King’s Cross Road

Website of current institution

It no longer exists

Books about it

Guide to Health: Being a Collection of Cases of Cure Effected by Morison’s Pills (The Vegetable Universal Medicine) during the Last Forty Years, published by the College (undated) [c. 1869]

John Malcolm Bulloch, The Centenary of James Morison the “Hygeist”, 1925

Archives

Printed material, including some series of the Hygeian Journal, is held in the British Library; many of the company’s records were apparently lost in the sudden move from 33 Euston Road in 1916 ((John Malcolm Bulloch, The Centenary of James Morison the “Hygeist”, 1925)

This page last modified 13 April, 2011 by Deborah Colville

 

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