1. George Combe was a Scottish lawyer and a spokesman of the phrenological movement for over 20 years.
24 Facts About George Combe
1. 2.
George Combe founded the Edinburgh Phrenological Society in 1820 and wrote The Constitution of Man.
3.
George Combe was born at Livingston's Yards, Edinburgh, the son of Marion and George Combe, a prosperous brewer in the city.
4.
In 1820 George Combe moved his office to Mylnes Court on the Royal Mile and moved house to 8 Hermitage Place in Stockbridge.
5.
The George Combe brothers lived together in a large dwelling at 25 Northumberland Street in the New Town from 1829.
6.
When Spurzheim came to Edinburgh in 1816, George Combe was invited to a friend's house, where he watched Spurzheim dissect a human brain.
7.
In 1820, George Combe helped to found the Phrenological Society of Edinburgh, which in 1823 established a Phrenological Journal.
8.
George Combe published a Manual, Elements of Phrenology, in June 1824.
9.
George Combe took private tuition in elocution; contemporaries described him as clever and opinionated.
10.
George Combe's discussions had an air of confidentiality and theatrical urgency.
11.
In 1836, George Combe stood for the chair of Logic at the University of Edinburgh against two other candidates: Sir William Hamilton and Isaac Taylor.
12.
In 1838 George Combe visited the United States to study the treatment of criminals there.
13.
George Combe initiated a programme of public education in chemistry, physiology, history and moral philosophy.
14.
George Combe sought to improve public education through a national, non-sectarian system.
15.
George Combe helped to set up a school in Edinburgh run on the principles of William Ellis, and did some teaching there in phrenology and physiology.
16.
George Combe was strongly behind the view that the state should be involved in the education system.
17.
In 1842, George Combe gave a course of 22 lectures on phrenology at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg and travelled about Europe enquiring into management of schools, prisons and asylums.
18.
On retiring, George Combe took a substantial terraced townhouse, 45 Melville Street, in Edinburgh's West End.
19.
George Combe was revising the 9th edition of the Constitution of Man when he died at Moor Park, Farnham in August 1858.
20.
George Combe was one of an active Edinburgh scene of people thinking about the nature of heredity and its possible malleability, as Lamarck proposed.
21.
George Combe himself was no Lamarckian, but in the decades before Darwin's Origin of Species was published, the Constitution was probably the single most important vehicle for disseminating naturalistic progressivism in the English-speaking world.
22.
George Combe moved into the economic arena with a pamphlet on The Currency Question.
23.
In 1833, George Combe married Cecilia Siddons, daughter of the actress Sarah Siddons and sister of Henry Siddons, author of Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action.
24.
George Combe brought him a fortune and a happy, though childless marriage, preceded by a phrenological check for compatibility.