"the Alteration shall be made under the inspection of Messrs Adam"
Dr James Graham

Footnotes

A rare letter by Dr James Graham, the notorious quack-doctor and sexologist, at whose 'Temple of Health' the young Emma Hamilton is reputed to have worked. Graham had moved to the Adam Brothers' Adelphi in the autumn of 1779: "he settled in what he designated his Templum Aesculapium Sacrum, which was housed in the Adelphi Buildings, on the riverside by the Strand; from there he advertised his wonderful nostrums and cures...the temple was decked out with elaborate electrical machines, jars, conductors, and an 'electrical throne' insulated on glass pillars, together with chemical and therapeutic apparatus...To illustrate his performance he may have displayed barely draped young models as Hebe Vestina, or goddesses of health, including, according to subsequent legend, Emma Lyon, later to become Lady Hamilton. Graham also promised relief from impotence and sterility to those who hired his 'celestial bed', which was 12 feet long by 9 feet wide and 'supported by forty pillars of brilliant glass of the most exquisite workmanship'; it was also engraved with the legend, 'Be fruitful, multiply and replenish the earth', and linked up to 15 cwt of magnets and electrical machines. Apparently he charged £50 a night for the privilege of slipping between the sheets. The temple attracted large audiences, the ladies going 'incog', according to Henry Angelo" (Roy Porter, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). The recipient of this letter may have been the actor John Henderson, but seems more probably to have been the lawyer and amateur watercolorist of that name, father of the horse painter Charles Cooper Henderson. No letter by Graham is recorded as having been sold in American Book Prices Current.