1. John Bulwer was an English physician and early Baconian natural philosopher who wrote five works exploring the Body and human communication, particularly by gesture.
13 Facts About John Bulwer
1. 2.
John Bulwer was the first person in England to propose educating deaf people, the plans for an Academy he outlines in Philocophus and The Dumbe mans academie.
3.
John Bulwer was the only surviving son of an apothecary named Thomas Bulwer and Marie Evans of St Albans.
4.
On her death in 1638 John Bulwer inherited some property in St Albans from which he derived a small income.
5.
John Bulwer's known friends had nearly all been educated there and he supported William Laud and the High Church party during the Civil War.
6.
Later in life Bulwer would adopt a girl named Chirothea Johnson, and, as he states in his will "bred her up from a child as my own".
7.
In total John Bulwer published five works, all of which were either early examples or the first of their kind.
8.
John Bulwer always referred to them as separate works but over time they have come to be seen as a single volume.
9.
Francis Bacon had described gestures as "Transient Hieroglyphics" and suggested that Gesture should be the focus of a new scientific enquiry, John Bulwer was the first to undertake the task.
10.
John Bulwer believed it was Nature's recompense that deaf people should communicate through gesture, "that wonder of necessity that Nature worketh in men that are born deafe and dumb; who can argue and dispute rhetorically by signes".
11.
The other observation of Duchenne that John Bulwer foreshadowed was that the contraction of the orbicularis oculi accompanies genuine smiles of happiness but does not occur in deceptive or non-joyful smiles.
12.
John Bulwer's politics are indivisible from his other thinking, for him Nature was a Monarch, "sovereignty delegated from God".
13.
The book ends with John Bulwer stating that he is going to stop writing and return to working as a physician.