Born at Stockport, the son of Thomas Hope, a wealthy manufacturer, James Hope received his schooling at Macclesfield Grammar School and his medical training at Edinburgh University, where he was a president of the Royal Medical Society and passed his examinations brilliantly. For some months before graduating in 1825 he was a student at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. He then spent a year in Paris under Chomel; a tour of Switzerland, Italy, Germany and Holland preceded his return to England to take the L.R.C.P. in 1828. In the same year he started a practice in London which reached highly remunerative proportions within ten years. He was appointed physician to the Marylebone Infirmary in 1831. He was one of the first exponents of auscultation, and wrote articles on the heart for the Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine (1833-35).

His principal work, A Treatise on the Diseases of the Heart and Great Vessels, was published in 1832 and reached a fourth edition in 1849. In 1833—34 there appeared his Principles and Illustrations of Morbid Anatomy. He lectured at the Aldersgate Street Medical School and at St. George’s Hospital, to which he became assistant physician in 1834. Although appointed full physician six years later, he was physically unequal to the post and died of consumption within a year. His wife, Anne Fulton, who had assisted him in some of his publications, lived to make the acquaintance of eminent Catholic churchmen, including Newman, and to write a life of St. Thomas à Becket and other religious works. Their son, Sir T. C. Hope, rose to high rank in the Indian Civil Service.

G H Brown

[D.N.B., xxvii, 316; British and Foreign Med. Review, xii, 286; Mrs. Anne Hope, Memoir, 1842 (reviewed in Lancet, 1845; Lond. Medical Gazette, 1842, xxx, 692)]