James Manby Gully (14 March 1808 – 1883) was a Victorian medical doctor, well known for practising hydrotherapy, or the "water cure". Along with his partner James Wilson, he founded a very successful "hydropathy" (as it was then called) clinic in Malvern, Worcestershire, which had many notable Victorians, including such figures as Charles Darwin and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as clients.
Gully's clinic using Malvern water in Great Malvern, and those that followed, were largely responsible for Malvern's rapid development from a village to a large town. He is also remembered as a suspect in the Charles Bravo poisoning case.
James Manby Gully was born in Kingston, Jamaica, the son of a wealthy coffee planter. When he was 6 he was taken to England to attend school in Liverpool, then went on to the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris. He became a medical student at the University of Edinburgh in 1825, as did Charles Darwin in the same year. After three years at Edinburgh, Gully became an externe at L'École de Médecine in Paris, then returned to Edinburgh to take his MD in 1829.
Gully began his practise as a physician in London in 1830, and went on to write and translate numerous medical books and papers, becoming a fellow of the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London and a fellow of the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh. He edited the London Medical and Surgical Journal and the Liverpool Medical Gazette. Gully showed an interest in the idea of transmutation of species, and translated an evolutionary treatise on Comparative Physiology by the embryologist Friedrich Tiedemann.