Author: KITTOE, William Hamilton
Biography:
KITTOE, William Hamilton (1795-1846: ancestry.com)
Kittoe, who became a physician and an advocate of homeopathy, started life with quite different expectations. He was born at Stoke Damerel, Devon, on 4 Jan. 1795 and baptised William Hugh Edward there on 31 Aug., the son of a captain in the Royal Navy, William Hugh Kittoe, and his wife Anna Hamilton. On 29 Oct. 1815 he married Martha Knight at Loders, Dorset; they had eight children and their younger (and only surviving) son George became a career army officer. His only volume of verse, Wild Roses (1818), was published by subscription at Dorchester, Dorset, the subscribers’ list an eclectic mix of military men, minor peers, gentlemen and ladies. Kittoe practised medicine in the 1830s; after securing a license from the Society of Apothecaries in 1843, he established himself in general practice in London, specialising in medicine for women. He was the author of a Domestic Medical Pocket-book (1837, several editions), of The Boudoir Companion: or Ladies’ Best Medical Friend (1842), and of Consumption, the New Cure: Asthma, the New Remedy (1842). He ran an institution for the cure of asthma on Thayer St., Manchester Square, and grew increasingly interested in prescribing plant-based remedies and minute quantities of toxic substances in treatment. He was summoned to the bankruptcy court in June 1846 but died at his home in Harley St. shortly afterwards and was buried on 26 Aug, 1846. The death notice identifies him as formerly a lieutenant in the East Kent militia, and as leaving a widow and large family “to deplore his loss.” (ancestry.com 3 May 2025; findmypast.com 3 May 2025; hahnemannhouse.org 3 May 2025; Morning Post 27 Aug. 1846) HJ