Lydia Folger Fowler

Lydia Folger Fowler (May 5, 1823 – January 26, 1879) was a pioneering American physician, professor of medicine, and activist. She was the second American woman to earn a medical degree (after Elizabeth Blackwell) and one of the first American women in medicine and a prominent woman in science. She married a phrenologist and her daughter, Jessie Allen Fowler, continued their ideas. Family life Lydia Folger was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, in 1823, to Gideon and Eunice Macy Folger, a historic Massachusetts family descended from Peter Foulger (1618–1690). Lydia was the great-great-great-great granddaughter of Peter Foulger and Mary Morrill Foulger. Through them she was the first cousin four times removed of Benjamin Franklin. Other notable family members included her extended cousins Lucretia Coffin Mott and Maria Mitchell and her paternal aunt Phebe Folger Coleman. Lydia was also a member of the Starbuck whaling family of Nantucket through her paternal grandmother Elizabeth Starbuck Folger (April 13, 1738 - 1821). Her mother was notably a member of the Macy family of Nantucket whose descendants would later found Macy's department stores. Folger married Lorenzo Niles Fowler, a phrenologist, on September 19, 1844. Lydia Folger Fowler also gave herself the nickname of "Mrs. L. N. Fowler" to incorporate the initials of her husband into her name. She met Lorenzo at the house of her paternal uncle, Walter Folger, Jr., an "eccentric and famous astronomer-navigator in Nantucket". Lorenzo and his brother, Orson Squire Fowler, were well-known phrenologists; the New York Times noted in his obituary that "Prof. Fowler examined the heads of many distinguished men, among them Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, William Cullen Bryant, Baron Rothschild, Li Hung Chang, and Sir Henry Irving." Lydia and Lorenzo Fowler had three daughters. Two daughters, Amelia (b. 1846) and Lydia (b. 1850), died young. The third daughter, Jessie Allen Fowler was also a phrenologist. Lydia Fowler was the honorary secretary of the British Women's Temperance Association, and Jessie succeeded her mother in that position. In 1896, Jessie accompanied her father when he returned to America and she became the editor of the Fowler's Phrenological Journal. Jessie inherited the company of Fowler and Wells after her father and aunt died in 1896 and 1901. She continued to write and died in 1932.