Medical practice before the aura investigation
Born at Bury St Edmunds in 1847, Kilner studied at St John’s College, Cambridge, and at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. A notice in the London Gazette records the dissolution of his partnership with Hunter Finlay in 1873, after which Kilner continued the Kensington practice himself. Sheffield’s family archive identifies his wife Margaret Catherine and their daughter Catherine Margaret, born in 1876.
He took charge of electrotherapy at St Thomas’s in 1879 and became a member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1883. His later investigation of a supposed atmosphere surrounding the body culminated in The Human Atmosphere in 1911 and a revised edition in 1920, the year of his death. The professional and family records give firmer landmarks than the differing later accounts of the exact circumstances of his death.
Observation, inference and the hope of a method
Kilner’s title describes an aura made visible with chemical screens. His preface presents the inquiry as independent of occultism, and the book arranges reports through comparisons, case histories, tables and drawings. It seeks to make something usually associated with clairvoyance available to an observer using an apparatus.
The preface also acknowledges the small number of cases and the possibility of overly dogmatic deductions. That qualification sits beside stronger hopes for diagnostic usefulness. The diagrams record what Kilner believed he saw; their apparent regularity does not independently establish its cause. Read as a historical investigation, the book shows the steps by which a reported perception becomes a proposed phenomenon and then a medical claim, each requiring a different degree of support.
