James Hunt (speech therapist)

James Hunt (1833 – 29 August 1869) was a speech therapist in London, England who had among his clients Charles Kingsley, Leo Tennyson (son of the poet laureate Alfred Tennyson) and Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Lewis Carroll was a children’s author, mathematician, and clergyman but had a severe stammer that affected his job. The 1861 census shows that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was staying at Ore House in 1961 and being treated by Dr Hunt a psellismolligist. Since his book was published in 1865 it is quite possible that some of it was written during his stay.

His other main interest was in anthropology and in 1863 he established the Anthropological Society of London, which after his death merged with the more established Ethnological Society of London to become the Royal Anthropological Institute.

James Hunt was born in Swanage, Dorset, the son of the speech therapist Thomas Hunt (1802–1851) and his wife Mary. He was trained by his father in the art of curing stuttering by means of breath exercises, muscle control and building the patient's confidence. He bought a doctorate from the University of Giessen in Germany and set up a practice in 1856 in Regent Street, London. He dedicated his first Manual on the subject to Charles Kingsley who spent three weeks with him in 1859. He moved to Hastings where ran residential courses during the summer season with his sister Elizabeth's husband, Rev. Henry F. Rivers.

In 1854 he joined the Ethnological Society of London because of his interest in racial differences and from 1859 to 1862 was the honorary secretary. However many members of this society disliked his attacks on humanitarian and missionary societies and the anti-slavery movement. So in 1863 with the help of the explorer Richard Burton he set up the Anthropological Society of London, becoming its first president. His paper The Negro's place in nature was greeted with boos and hisses when given at the British Association meeting in 1863 because of its defence of slavery in the Confederate States of America and belief in the plurality of the human species.

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