Agnes Sillars Hamilton

Agnes Sillars Hamilton (1790s – October 22, 1870) was a Scottish phrenologist.

Agnes Sillars Hamilton
Born
Agnes Sillars

1790s
DiedOctober 22, 1870
Edinburgh
NationalityUnited Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
Known forPhrenology
Spouse(s)Edward Hamilton
ChildrenArchibald Sillars Hamilton

Life

She was born in about 1794 and her parents were Jane (born MacDougall) and Archibald Sillars. In 1819 married Edward Hamilton and they had a son, Archibald Sillars Hamilton.[1]

She comes to notice in 1832 when she was known as a lecturer on politics. She moved to the subject of women's equality and then onto phrenology. By the 1840s she was reported as dealing in "practical phrenology".[2] Hamilton would use a group of marbles to illustrate the principles of phrenology.[1] Over fifteen years she said that she had analysed the heads of 60,000 people as she toured throughout Britain and Ireland. Where she gathered interest she would spend some months in that town but in other cases she would quickly move on.[2]

She was well received but she was not able to retire and she attracted varying reviews from acknowledged phrenologists George Combe and Andrew Combe[2] of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society. One account notes her as a "dirty old wench".[3]

Her son Archibald Sillars Hamilton was a phrenologist in his twenties and he left for Australia in 1854 where he continued that profession.[3] Archibald was given the head of Ned Kelly after his death and he published an account of the skull's phrenology.[1]

Hamilton died in Edinburgh in 1870.[2]

gollark: So yes.
gollark: Is this one of those things where you use a pointer when you really mean an array because the C type system is atrocious?
gollark: Yes, that's UTF-16, isn't it.
gollark: "ah yes all my strings are one character"
gollark: What? Why would strings be a pointer to one u32?

References
  1. "Getting a head". Portrait magazine. Retrieved 2019-06-28.
  2. The new biographical dictionary of Scottish women. Ewan, Elizabeth. Edinburgh. ISBN 9781474436298. OCLC 1057237368.CS1 maint: others (link)
  3. Alexandra Roginski (9 June 2015). The Hanged Man and the Body Thief: Finding Lives in a Museum Mystery. Monash University Publishing. pp. 38–. ISBN 978-1-922235-66-4.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.