HINTON, James (1822-1875), aural surgeon and author, son of John Howard Hinton, Baptist minister and author of the History and Topography of the United States and other works, was born at Reading in 1822. He was educated at his grandfather’s school near Oxford, and at the Nonconformist school at Harpenden, and in 1838, on his father’s removal to London, was apprenticed to a woollendraper in Whitechapel, where he came into contact with a phase of human life in its miserable and degraded forms which influenced powerfully the whole cast of his after thought. After retaining this situation about a year he became clerk in an insurance office. The most of his evenings were spent by him in intense study, and this, joined to the ardour, amounting to morbidness, of his interest in moral problems, so affected his health that in his nineteenth year he resolved to seek refuge from his own thoughts by running away to sea. His intention having, however, been discovered, he was sent, on the advice of the physician who was consulted regarding his health, to St Bartholomew’s Hospital to study for the medical profession. After receiving his diploma in 1847, he was for some time assistant surgeon at Newport, Essex, but the same year he went out to Sierra Leone to take medical charge of the free labourers on their voyage thence to Jamaica, after which his interest in their welfare prompted him to remain a year on the island. After his return to England in 1850, he entered into partnership with a surgeon in London, where he soon had his interest awakened specially in aural surgery, and gave also much of his attention to physiology and to problems bearing on the relation between mind and body. In his practice he became convinced that in the immense majority of cases of ill-health it ...was the hope of cure rather than the drug that effected the remedy, a fact which explained to him much of the success of homoeopathy, and induced him to lay the principal stress on moral methods of cure. He made his first appearance as an author in 1856 by contributing a series of papers on physiological and ethical subjects to the Christian Spectator ; and the success of his work Man and his Dwelling Place, which appeared in 1858, determined him, notwithstanding that he had married in 1852, to give up his medical practice in order to devote his whole attention to writing on those practical moral problems which chiefly occupied his thoughts. A series of papers entitled “Physiological Riddles,” which he contributed to the Cornhill Magazine, and afterwards published under the title Life in Nature, as well as another series entitled Thoughts on Health, written for the same periodical and collected and published separately in 1871, gave evidence of great aptitude in popular scientific exposition; but his interest in speculation was too absorbing to permit him to apply himself with sufficient pertinacity to literary work, and after a year’s trial of it he found it necessary to resume his profession. In 1863 he obtained the appointment of aural surgeon to Guy’s Hospital, after which he speedily acquired a lucrative west-end practice, and the reputation of being the most skilful aural surgeon of his day, a reputation fully borne out by his works, An Atlas of Diseases of the Memhrana Tympani and Questions of Aural Surgery, which are regarded as the chief authorities in this branch of surgery. The skill he had now obtained in his profession seemed to justify him in 1869 in resuming his philosophical studies, but the mental excitement thus produced, added to his professional labours, appears to have inflicted permanent injury on his brain; and, although by giving up his practice in 1874 he obtained partial relief, he began to suffer from sleeplessness and depression, and died of acute inflammation of the brain, 16th December 1875.
In addition to the works already mentioned, Hinton was the author of the Mystery of Man, and The Place of the Physician. On account of their fresh and vigorous discussion of many of the important moral and social problems of the time, his writings have had a wide circulation on both sides of the Atlantic. He contributed also several papers to the Contemporary Review and other periodicals. His Life and Letters, edited by Ellice Hopkins, with an introduction by Sir W. W. Gull, appeared in 1878.
