Dr James Graham

James Graham (1745–1794) was a Scottish proponent of electrical cures, showman, and pioneer in sex therapy. A self-styled doctor, he was best known for his electro-magnetic musical Grand State Celestial Bed. Dismissed as a quack by medical experts, Graham apparently believed in the efficacy of his unusual treatments.

Historian Roy Porter writing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that Graham's sexological views were quite typical of the period.

James Graham, son of a saddler, was born on 23 June 1745 in Edinburgh, where he trained in medicine, but left medical school without taking a degree. Probably with the help of William Buchan, future author of the best-seller Domestic Medicine, Graham set up as an apothecary in Doncaster, Yorkshire, and in 1764 he married Mary Pickering of Ackworth. They had three children, of whom a son James, a diplomat, and a daughter survived their father.

In 1770 Graham left England for America, travelling around the middle colonies as an oculist and aurist before settling in Philadelphia. Here he learned the principles of electricity from Ebenezer Kinnersley, Benjamin Franklin's friend and collaborator, and began to develop the prototype of his Celestial Bed. Leaving America around the time of the first rumblings of the American Revolution, he worked briefly in Bristol and then Bath before setting up practice in London, where Horace Walpole consulted him about his gout.

After travelling in Holland, Germany and Russia in 1776, Graham set up practice in Bath, Somerset. Advertisements promoting cures using "Effluvia, Vapours and Applications ætherial, magnetic or electric" attracted his first celebrity patient, the historian Catharine Macaulay. She became the subject of scandal in 1778 when she married James Graham’s 21-year-old brother William, who was less than half her age.

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