Author: Gower, Samuel
Biography:
GOWER, Samuel (1798-1876: Spencer)
He was born on 14 Apr. 1798 at Taunton, Somersetshire, and baptised on 13 May at the Wesleyan Octagon chapel and temple, the eldest child of Rev. Richard Gower (1760-1836) and Mary Pike (1773-1849), who had married the previous year. He went to school in Canterbury and was then apprenticed to a physician. He established a practice in Finsbury Square, London (LSA 1823) (MRCS (1846). His early epic poem, Napoleon (1821) and translations from the Greek poets gained him entry, albeit peripheral, to the Holland House circle in London. He married Mary Ann Campbell (1808-78), the second daughter of the Wesleyan Methodist minister and sometime Jamaican missionary, Rev. Daniel Campbell (1771-1835), on 12 Feb. 1828 at Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. They had four daughters and two sons. He later lived at Holmfirth, Yorkshire, from where he signed the preface to Monopolygraph(1841) and was medical officer to the Huddersfield Poor Law Union. He returned to London in the 1840s and practised in Hampstead. In 1848 he went to Wales after an outbreak of cholera and published a paper on it in the Lancet. In September 1850, he and his family arrived in Natal (South Africa) with other J. C. Byrne and Co. settlers on board the Nile and worked as the ship’s surgeon. In 1853 he was appointed district surgeon for Pietermaritzburg, where in 1855 he helped establish and run Grey’s Hospital. With a large family he struggled on the salary of £20 a year but in later years also held other posts and lived more comfortably. He continued to write poetry and publish in magazines and newspapers but did not publish a further volume of poetry after 1841. Ill health forced him to take leave (1869-72) and he was admitted to the Government Asylum in Sept. 1872. In 1875 he was declared insane. He died of bronchitis on 8 Oct. 1876, at Erf 34 Burger Street, Pietermaritzburg. His wife, Mary Anne, died on 27 May 1878 at the home of her married daughter Elizabeth Shaw. (Shelagh O’Byrne Spencer, British Settlers in Natal 1824-1857: A Biographical Register[2001], 7: 145-7; Edmund H. Burrows, A History of Medicine in South Africa [1958], 209; ancestry.co.uk 27 Nov. 2023; Morning Post 16 Feb. 1828; Churchill’s Medical Directory, 1847, 1848, 1849; The Natal Directory [1872]) AA