Lydia Folger Fowler
| Lydia Folger Fowler | |
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| Born | Lydia Folger May 5, 1823 Nantucket , Massachusetts, United States |
| Died | January 26, 1879 (aged 56) London, England |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Eclectic Medicine |
| Alma mater | Central Medical College, New York |
| Known for | Second female physician in the United States |
Lydia Folger Fowler (May 5, 1823 – January 26, 1879) was a pioneering American physician, professor of medicine, and activist. She was the second woman in America to earn a medical degree.
Lydia Folger was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, in 1822, 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, who's descendents would later found Macy's department stores.
Folger married Lorenzo Niles Fowler, a phrenologist, on September 19, 1844, after meeting him at the house of her paternal uncle, Walter Folger, Jr., an "eccentric and famous astronomer-navigator in Nantucket". The couple had three daughters. Two daughters, Amelia (b. 1846) and Lydia (b. 1850), died young; the third daughter, Jessie Allen Fowler (b. 1856 or 1860), was born in 1860 and was, like her father, also a phrenologist. Like his brother, Orson Squire Fowler, Lorenzo Fowler was a well-known phrenologist; 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."
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