William Frédéric Edwards

William Frédéric Edwards (1777–1842) was a French physiologist, of Jamaican background, who was also a pioneer anthropologist. He has been called "the father of ethnology in France".

He was born in Jamaica to English parents, and was a pupil at New College, Hackney, a contemporary of William Hazlitt. Educated also in Bruges, he worked first in the city library there. He went to Paris in 1808 as a medical student. There he studied under François Magendie, wrote a thesis on the physiology of the eye, and became Magendie's assistant.

Edwards was naturalised in France in 1828, and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1829. He belonged to or contributed to a number of French learned societies; in 1832 he was elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques and Académie Royale de Médécine.

Edwards began independent research in 1815–6, working on manganese oxide compounds with Pierre Chevillot. At the same time he began investigations on asphyxia in animals.

Edwards was a vitalist who studied the effect of physical forces on processes in living organisms. His work led to the book De l'influence des agens physiques sur la vie (1824) (English translation by Thomas Hodgkin). Edwards was following a direction in Lavoisier's research on "animal chemistry", and addressing questions raised in Magendie's journal. He carried out experimental work at the Collège de France.

Edwards was influenced by Amédée Thierry, to whom he addressed his 1829 essay Des caractères physiologiques des races humaines considérés dans leurs rapports avec l'histoire. Thierry had studied the backgrounds of the Gauls and Franks of the Late Antique period in France. Edwards took up a theory of "permanence of types", influenced also by René Primevère Lesson. As related by Edwards, he had been convinced of such a permanence since the early 1820s, when on a visit to London he was discussing the works of James Cowles Prichard with Hodgkin and Robert Knox. Knox convinced him, with the help of an Ancient Egyptian tomb exhibited by Giovanni Battista Belzoni, that Egyptian and other ethnic "types" persisted from antiquity.

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