George Combe

George Combe (1836) by Daniel Macnee

George Combe (born October 21, 1788 in Edinburgh , † August 14, 1858 in Farnham , England ) was a Scottish lawyer and writer who dealt with phrenology and education .

family

George Combe grew up near Edinburgh with his younger brother Andrew Combe , who became a famous physicist and, like him, a famous phrenologist. In 1833 he married Cecilia Siddons, a daughter of the famous tragic actress Sarah Siddons , who enjoyed great success at London's Theater Royal Drury Lane .

Career

After attending Edinburgh High School, he began studying law at the University of Edinburgh in 1804 . At the same time he worked in a law firm until he opened his own law firm in 1812, which was extremely successful, as his cleverness and conscientiousness made him a good lawyer and thus maintained a large law firm.

When in 1815 the Edinburgh Review contained an article on the system of "craniology" by Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim , which was denounced by the public as "a piece of thorough quackery from start to finish," George Combe began advocating the Interesting in phrenology and when Spurzheim was visiting Edinburgh in 1816, George Combe began to study seriously.

So in 1823, with the help of his friends and together with his brother, as already mentioned, he founded a phrenologist, the Edinburgh Phrenological Journal, which George accompanied on a voluntary basis for 23 years. After he went to Germany in 1837 and closed his law firm to devote himself entirely to phrenology, he and his wife visited the United States . He stayed for two years and gave 158 lectures on phrenology during his stay. On his return to Great Britain in June 1840, he published his moral philosophy.

In 1842 Combe held a course with 22 lectures on phrenology at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg , and he also traveled a lot in Europe, visited schools, prisons and asylums.

education

He tried to improve the education of the lower classes and so he helped a school that should run on the principles of William Ellis , only without the religious background. It opened on December 4, 1848 with William Mattieu Willams as the reactor. Due to the great demand, the school moved shortly after it opened. But when Willams left school in 1854, it was the breakdown of the ambitious and encyclopedic curriculum. The school mutated into a lecture hall and shows that Combe's educational idea is “fleeting”, although it has incorporated some educational ideas.

Works

Essays on Phrenology, or an Inquiry into the System of Gall and Spurzheim (1819)
System of Phrenology (2 vols., 8vo, 1824)
The Constitution of Man (1828)
Moral Philosophy (1840)
Notes on the United States of North America (1841)

Editor:

Edinburgh Phrenological Journal (1823-1846)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Combe, George
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	English author and doctor
DATE OF BIRTH	October 21, 1788
PLACE OF BIRTH	Edinburgh , Scotland
DATE OF DEATH	August 14, 1858
Place of death	Farnham , England