(Material researched & presented by Barbara Armstrong)

Two Goulds came to Melbourne and helped promote homœopathy in Victoria - Edward Gardiner Gould, who helped establish the Kidner and Gould homœopathic pharmacy in Melbourne in 1860, and Dr James Emery Gould, who arrived in Melbourne in 1873 and was honorary physician for the Melbourne Homœopathic Dispensary. For many years I have wondered whether there was some family connection between the two. Recent research has now proven this to be the case.

In the 1861 census of England, Edward senior is listed as a 'homœopathic chemist' at 100 Pentonville Rd, with another of his sons, Joseph, being a 'chemist's apprentice'.

By this stage, Edward junior had already migrated to Australia. Shipping records state that he was 19 years of age. After helping to establish the Kidner and Gould pharmacy in Collins Street in Melbourne and Gould’s homœopathic pharmacy in Geelong, Edward junior eventually returned to the UK (in the 1870s), where he studied medicine in Ireland and qualified in 1876. He then practised in various locations around England, the last one being at Tunbridge Wells.

In the meantime, brother James Emery Gould graduated from Edinburgh University in 1872 as a qualified allopathic physician. He was Obstetric Assistant at Middlesex Hospital, London, and Senior House Surgeon at the Liverpool Homœopathic Dispensary in England. Edward junior must have provided good reports about life in Melbourne, as his brother James arrived in Melbourne on 20 February, 1873 aboard the “Lincolnshire”. The saloon passengers were so happy with him and his medical services aboard ship that they took him out to dinner and presented him with a silver claret jug, suitably inscribed.

James wrote Homœopathy and its Professors in Melbourne in the same year. This was a 14 page summary of homœopathy’s principles, practice, and results. He finally settled at Wollongong in New South Wales, where he died in 1883.

© Barbara Armstrong