George Stevenson Knowles M.D. (1818 – 13 April 1861) was a British orthodox physician who converted to homeopathy. In addition to his homeopathic private practice in Wolverhampton, Knowles held an appointment as house surgeon at the Birmingham Homeopathic Hospital.
George Stevenson Knowles was a friend of Dr. George Fearon, Joseph Lawrence, William Parsons, Alfred Crosby Pope.
George Stevenson Knowles was born in Glasgow, the second son of Irish dramatist and actor James Sheridan Knowles (1784 – 1862) and his first wife, the actress Maria Charteris (1789 – 1841). George Stevenson Knowles was the younger brother of architect James Thomas Knowles (1806 – 1884) and older brother to journalist Richard Brinsley Knowles (1820 – 1882).
Knowles began his medical training under orthodox surgeon Thomas Ayre (1807 – 1862) in Barnsley before studying at Belfast medical school and then Edinburgh. In 1851 Knowles received his M.D. from the University of Edinburgh.
While in Edinburgh, George Stevenson Knowles became a close friend of Alfred Crosby Pope. The prejudice Pope suffered there under the attacks of the allopaths, led Knowles to convert to homeopathy.
After completing his studies Knowles worked for a short time at the Belfast Homoeopathic Dispensary but, wanting to learn more about the Hahnemannian system, he departed for a brief residency at the Manchester Homeopathic Hospital. Soon after, Knowles was appointed House Surgeon at The Birmingham Homeopathic Dispensary, alongside George Fearon, Joseph Lawrence, and William Parsons.
In April 1846 Knowles married Londoner Elizabeth Anne Roffe (c.1824 – 1884). In 1854 he remarried, Emma Jane Morton (1833 – 1914), daughter of a Birmingham area manufacturer.
Knowles was active in the local homeopathic medical community. In October 1851 he was voted to the chair for a conference of midlands homeopathic medical practitioners held at the Queen’s Hotel, Birmingham.
In 1853 George Stevenson Knowles entered private practice in Wolverhampton, and he practiced there until 1860.
George Stevenson Knowles died suddenly in 1861 of typhoid at the Manchester home of his friend John Mason Galloway. He had been suffering from rheumatism, which had forced him to give up his practice in 1860, but his hopes were high that a move to the south coast of England would enable him to recover and resume medicine.
Knowles left behind his widow, Emma, who married his colleague Joseph Lawrence, in 1862.
George Stevenson Knowles’s Obituary is in The British Homeopathic Review in 1861.
Of interest:
James Sheridan Knowles 1784 – 1862, father of George Stevenson Knowles, was an Irish dramatist and actor.
James Sheridan Knowles was a friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, The Kemble Sisters, William Charles MacReady, Robert Peel,
His father was the lexicographer James Knowles (1759-1840), cousin of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels, was a follower of Emanuel Swedenborg, and he was the grand nephew of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and a friend of Oscar Wilde‘s mother.
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