John Thurnam
Encyclopedia
John Thurnam was an English
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 psychiatrist
Psychiatrist
A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. All psychiatrists are trained in diagnostic evaluation and in psychotherapy...

, archaeologist, and ethnologist. He was Medical Superintendent of The Retreat, the Quaker psychiatric hospital near York. In 1848 he reported two maternal first cousins with an unusual condition affecting the skin, hair cand teeth (an ectodermal dysplasia); he had performed an examination post mortem on one of the two men, including relevant histopathology.

Life

The son of William Thurnam, by his wife, Sarah Clark, he was born at Lingcroft, near York
York
York is a walled city, situated at the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Foss in North Yorkshire, England. The city has a rich heritage and has provided the backdrop to major political events throughout much of its two millennia of existence...

. He belonged to a Quaker family. After a private education he became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1834, a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians
Royal College of Physicians
The Royal College of Physicians of London was founded in 1518 as the College of Physicians by royal charter of King Henry VIII in 1518 - the first medical institution in England to receive a royal charter...

 in 1843, and a fellow in 1859. He graduated M.D. at the University of Aberdeen
University of Aberdeen
The University of Aberdeen, an ancient university founded in 1495, in Aberdeen, Scotland, is a British university. It is the third oldest university in Scotland, and the fifth oldest in the United Kingdom and wider English-speaking world...

 in 1846. Having served as resident medical officer in the Westminster Hospital
Westminster Hospital
Westminster Hospital was a hospital in London, England, founded in 1719. In 1834 a medical school attached to the hospital was formally founded....

 from 1834 till 1838, Thurnam was appointed medical superintendent of the Friends' retreat in York. That post he held until 1849. The Wiltshire county asylum at Devizes
Devizes
Devizes is a market town and civil parish in Wiltshire, England. The town is about southeast of Chippenham and about east of Trowbridge.Devizes serves as a centre for banks, solicitors and shops, with a large open market place where a market is held once a week...

 was then being built, and the committee selected Thurnam to be medical superintendent. It was opened in 1851, and he remained in active charge until his death.

Thurnam's leisure was devoted to statistical facts on mental illness and investigations of anthropological and antiquarian interest. He was twice elected president of the Medico-Psychological Association.

Thurnam died at Devizes . On 18 June 1851 he had married Frances Elizabeth, daughter of Matthew Wyatt, a metropolitan police magistrate, and sister of Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt. By her he left three sons.

Works

While at the Westminster Hospital he had gained some reputation from his observations on aneurysm
Aneurysm
An aneurysm or aneurism is a localized, blood-filled balloon-like bulge in the wall of a blood vessel. Aneurysms can commonly occur in arteries at the base of the brain and an aortic aneurysm occurs in the main artery carrying blood from the left ventricle of the heart...

 of the heart. In 1843 he published ‘Observations and Essays on the Statistics of Insanity, and on Establishments for the Insane.’ This work contained a reprint of the ‘Statistics of the York Retreat,’ first issued in 1841, together with an historical and descriptive sketch.

After his move to Wiltshire
Wiltshire
Wiltshire is a ceremonial county in South West England. It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset, Somerset, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire. It contains the unitary authority of Swindon and covers...

 he gave special consideration to craniology. Thurnam with Dr. Joseph Barnard Davis published a work in two volumes under the title of Crania Britannica in 1865 it was a very important work for Craniometry. Both Thurnam and Davis were both believers in polygenism
Polygenism
Polygenism is a theory of human origins positing that the human races are of different lineages . This is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity.- Origins :...

, that different races had been created separately. Dr. Joseph Barnard Davis was a collector of racial crania he had a collection of over 1700 specimens. Because of the differences of the crania of each race, Davis and Thurnam believed that the proofs of polygenism were to be found in studying the skull types of different races. Because each race had a different size and type of skull then the only logical explanation is separate origins.

Two shorter papers were ‘Synostoses of the Cranial Bones regarded as a Race Character’ (Nat. Hist. Rev. 1865), and t ‘Weight of the Human Brain’ (Journ. of Ment. Science, 1868). Thurnam recognised the importance of the obliteration of the sutures of the skull, which he had observed in the dolichocephalous crania of the Stone Age, but not in the brachycephalous crania of the bronze period. His conclusion was that this is a strictly race character.
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