John Thurnam [SEP] occupation
John Thurnam
John Thurnam (28 December 1810 – 24 September 1873) was an English psychiatrist, 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 and teeth (an ectodermal dysplasia); he had performed an examination post mortem on one of the two men, including relevant histopathology.
Life.
Thurnam was born at Lingcroft, near Copmanthorpe, York to the Quaker William
prime advocate of polygeny, and was the author of an anthropological work titled" De la Pluralité des Races Humaines" (1858), which was translated into English as "The Plurality of the Human Race" in 1864 by the Anthropological Society.
John Thurnam with Joseph Barnard Davis published a work in two volumes under the title of "Crania Britannica" in 1865, important for craniometry. Thurnam and Davis were both believers in polygenism, in the form that different races had been created separately. Davis was a collector of