John Epps

Epps, the eldest son of John Epps (see Epps family),[1] was born into a Calvinist[2] family in Sevenoaks, Kent on 15 February 1805. George Napoleon Epps was his half-brother.[3]

Epps became disillusioned with the religious atmosphere of his childhood.[2] After education at a dissenting academy and then Mill Hill School (near Hendon), he served an apprenticeship to an apothecary of the name of Dury or Durie.[3]

In 1824, at the age of 18, Epps went to Edinburgh to study medicine,[1] and in 1827 graduated at the age of 21.[1] He conceived of medicine as 'a tool of liberation for the poor and lower classes'.[4]

After graduating Epps moved back to London where he began to practice, eventually settling in Great Russell Street. In 1831 he married. He became Medical Director of the Royal Jennerian and London Vaccine Institution, on the death of John Walker. Epps had a Scottish degree, but no license from the Royal College of Physicians.[1][5][6]

Epps also lectured on chemistry, botany, and materia medica, in London locations. Initially this was at the Aldersgate Medical School, and Windmill Street;[7] and later at Westminster at the Hunterian School of Medicine. There was briefly (1830–31) a medical school in Brewer Street, set up by William Birmingham Costello, Epps and Michael Ryan.[8] Epps and Ryan then joined George Darby Dermott in giving lectures at the Western Dispensary in Gerrard Street; James Fernandez Clarke, in his memoirs, described Epps lecturing there as well-read and sympathetic but not deeply versed in practical chemistry, or botany.[1][9][10] Epps lectured publicly and extensively for the rest of his life, particularly on phrenology and homoeopathy, in London and elsewhere. When his health failed he continued to lecture in his own home.[1]

Introduced to it by his anatomy teacher William Sleigh while still a teenager, Epps embraced the phrenology of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim.[5] While in Edinburgh he became friends with the phrenologists George and Andrew Combe;[1] he had an introduction to Spurzheim through James Simpson.[5] He began to lecture on phrenology in 1827.[11] For Epps, phrenology was integrated with his Baptist Calvinism.[12] With John Elliotson, he supported applications of "phreno-mesmerism".[13]

Epps was influenced not only by continental phrenologists. He took from Gustav Carus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. His views were an idiosyncratic mixture from different sources, permitting an optimistic outlook within Calvinist views.[14]

Epps's grave at Kensal Green Cemetery, London, pictured in 2014

In the later 1830s and early 1840s, the Anthropological Society of London (not to be confused with the Anthropological Society of London founded in 1863 by Richard Francis Burton and Dr. James Hunt) was a phrenological group holding meetings, associated with the Christian Physician and Anthropological Magazine edited by Epps. John Isaac Hawkins acted as president.[15][16][17] Other members were Luke Burke[18] and William Mattieu Williams.[19] After 1842 it became part of the Christian Phrenological Society.[15]

Epps was drawn to homoeopathy in about 1837 after reading the works of Dr Paul Francis Curie; his other major influence in homoeopathy was Samuel Hahnemann.[1] He had a "very large homoeopathic practice, especially among the lower middle and lower classes of society".[1] His patients included Charlotte and Emily Brontë.[20][21]

At odds with Frederic Quin, the earliest British physician who practised homoeopathy, Epps did not join the British Homoeopathic Society. He associated with Curie in the English Homoeopathic Association.[3]

On 31 January 1869 Epps was attacked by paralysis, and he died, at the age of 64, on 12 February. He is interred at Kensal Green Cemetery, 19 February 1869.[1][22]

Epps supported "Knowledge Chartism", and opposed medical jargon.[26] He supported the proposal of Thomas Wakley for a London College of Medicine, speaking in support of it at a meeting in 1831, with his colleague George Dermott; he was on the steering committee for its formation, along with Joshua Brookes and David Daniel Davis.[27]

Not only did Epps reject the orthodox church establishments, but he also rejected a number of the mainstream Christian doctrines.[2] He rejected the doctrine of the immortal soul, emphasising instead resurrection as the escape from death. In this vein, the second coming of Christ is also emphasised. He taught that Hell is the grave, not the place of torment of mainstream Christianity. He also rejected the Christian Trinity, stating that Jesus, the Son of God, was a human by nature. He also spoke out against the glorification of war-heroes: "the honour of the British flag is a specious phrase which blinds men's eyes to right and wrong", he said.[2]

The most infamous of Epps' unorthodox views regards the devil (1842). He was one of a long line of Dissenters to take this view, stretching back through Simpson (1804), Lardner (1742), Sykes (1737), going back to the Dutch Anabaptist, David Joris (1540).[2] According to Epps, references in the Bible to the devil and Satan are, in the main, to be understood as personifications of the lustful principle in humans.[2] In 1842 he anonymously published The Devil: a Biblical exposition of the truth concerning that old serpent, the devil and Satan and a refutation of the beliefs obtaining in the world regarding sin and its source.[2][28] The publication brought considerable opposition and, according to historian Alan Eyre,' a lecture given shortly afterward to the Tooting Institution at the Mitre Inn in ... London ... caused serious offence and led to widespread ostracism and hostility'.[2] Similarly, a few years earlier he had delivered a series of lectures at the Dock Head Church to demonstrate that the devil is not a personal being and "this bold assertion drew upon him a world of abuse, and some patients declined to be treated by one holding such heterodox views".[1]

John Epps's faith stayed with him throughout his life; it is recorded that "with his last breath he expressed his humble, yet confident faith in the power, wisdom, and goodness of the Great Father of all spirits".[1]