Уильям Генри Фловер: Хирург, анатом и директор Музея естественной истории

English comparative anatomist and surgeon

Sir William Henry Flower (30 November 18311 July 1899) was an English surgeon, museum curator and comparative anatomist, who became a leading authority on mammals and especially on the primate brain. He supported Thomas Henry Huxley in an important controversy with Richard Owen about the human brain and eventually succeeded Owen as Director of the Natural History Museum in London.

Born on 30 November 1831 in his father's house at Stratford upon Avon in Warwickshire, he was the second son of Edward Fordham Flower, founder of the town brewery, and his wife Celina Greaves (18041884), eldest daughter of John Greaves and his wife Mary Whitehead. His paternal grandfather Richard Flower had married Elizabeth Fordham and settled at Albion, Illinois, where his father grew up. His uncles included the slate entrepreneur John Whitehead Greaves and William Pickering, Governor of Washington. His elder brother Charles Edward Flower ran the family brewery with the third brother Edgar Flower, while he chose a scientific career. First taught at home by his mother, he went to a school in Edgbaston at the age 11 and then from age 13 to a Pestalozzian school at Worksop under a Swiss headmaster, Dr B. Heldenmaier. There were ten hours schooling each day which included, rare at that time, science. Already a collector of natural history objects, he was made curator of the school museum and for almost all the rest of his life was a museum curator of one kind or another. He then attended University College, London, followed by the Middlesex Hospital, where he studied medicine and surgery. Graduating as an MB of London University in 1851, he won a gold medal in physiology and a silver in zoology and comparative anatomy. In recognition of his services, he received from the hands of Queen Victoria the Crimea Medal with clasps for Alma, Inkerman, Balaclava, and Sebastopol. Later, he received the Turkish Crimean War medal as well. When fit to work he returned to London, taking the diploma to become an FRCS (Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons) in 1857 and joining the staff of the Middlesex Hospital as a Demonstrator in Anatomy. In 1858 he married, and during the next year became Assistant Surgeon at the Middlesex, curator of the Anatomical Museum and also Lecturer on Comparative Anatomy. In the evolution debate he was among those who, like his wife's brother in law. the Reverend Professor Baden Powell, saw no threat to religious belief in accepting the theory. In 1883 he expounded his view in an address to the Church Congress in Reading under the title: "The bearing of science on religion".

On the recommendation of Huxley and others, in 1862 he became Conservator of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, holding the post for 22 years, and in 1864 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. It was he who made public the "absolute and complete destruction of two species of right whale by the reckless greed of the whalers". He was the first person to show that lemurs are primates. He was a leading authority on the arrangement of museums. He insisted on the importance of distinguishing between collections intended for the use of specialists and those designed for the instruction of the general public, pointing out that it was as futile to present to the former a number of merely typical forms as to provide the latter with a long series of specimens differing only in the most minute details. His ideas, which were largely and successfully applied to the museums of which he had charge, gained wide approval and entitle him to be seen as a reformer who did much to improve methods of museum arrangement and management. He became a public figure, his lectures being crowded and his views influential. In a study of deliberate deformation of the human body in various cultures, he included corsets and high heels, illustrating the effects with pictures of distorted female skeletons. Horrified at the widespread slaughter of birds to provide feathers for fashionable hats, he said of the egret: "one of the most beautiful of birds is being swept off the face of the earth under circumstances of peculiar cruelty, to minister to a passing fashion." Which led Beatrix Potter to write: "I wonder what Sir W Flower's speciality is besides ladies' bonnets."

Flower married Georgiana Rosetta Smyth, on 15 April 1858, at Stone in Buckinghamshire. Georgiana was the youngest daughter of Admiral William Henry Smyth, an astronomer and hydrographer, He and his wife led an active life outside his work, over the years meeting many leading figures in British society. Among their friends were the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the leading churchman Dean Stanley. Having been created a Companion of the Bath in 1887, three years after his first appointment to the Museum, he was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in 1892. He also received the Jubilee Medal and the Royal Prussian order "Pour le Mérite". Illness and overwork led him to take retirement from the Natural History Museum in August 1898 and he died at his home in South Kensington on I July 1899, aged 67. His remains were buried with his wife's family at Stone in Buckinghamshire.