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".[1] He is remembered largely for his principle of the permanency of physical "types." He was also a leader in the new science of "linguistique" and proposed a new branch of comparative philology based on pronunciation.[2]
Life
He was born in
Jamaica to English parents, and was a pupil at
New College, Hackney, a contemporary of
William Hazlitt.[3][4] 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.[1][5]
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.[10]
Edwards was a
vitalist who studied the effect of physical forces on processes in living organisms.[11] 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.[12]
Racial theories
Edwards was influenced by
Amédée Thierry,[13] to whom he addressed his 1829 essay Des caractères physiologiques des races humaines considérés dans leurs rapports avec l'histoire.[14] 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.[15] 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.[16]
As Edwards made clear, his notion of "type" was flexible; and
racial types became fundamental to 19th century debate on ethnology.[17] He followed on from the studies of
Johann Kaspar Lavater and
Franz Joseph Gall in
physiognomy,[18] and pioneered the concept of
race as determined by the shape of the face and head.[19] He supplemented his physiological work with a study of the
Celtic languages.[6][20]
Stendhal took his ideas on race from Edwards,[21] who in fact established the concept of ethnologie (
ethnology) in France.[22] Another personal contact among writers was
Jules Michelet: Edwards became his physician, and Michelet took ideas about "persistence of races" from Edwards and Thierry. This theorising applied very much to Europeans and particularly French people, and Edwards believed his own observations confirmed it.[23] Edwards has been called the first
anthropologist to discuss race. One of his concerns was justification of
French nationalism.[24]
Edwards came to theorise broadly about human diversity, influenced by
polygenism,[8] and argued in favour of fixed types and characters attached to populations.[25] He undermined the
environmentalist monogenism of Prichard, in which climate had affected human populations after a single creation:[26] he made a point of discounting the influence of climate on animal physiology in general.[27] A remark he made about cross-bred animal populations, to the effect that one type comes to predominate, was quoted by
Charles Darwin in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication.[28]
^Ian B. Stewart, "William Frédéric Edwards and the study of human races in France, from the Restoration to the July Monarchy." History of Science 58.3 (2020): 275-300.
^Martin S. Staum, Labeling People: French scholars on society, race and empire, 1815–1848 (2003), p. 129;
Google Books.
^Staffan Müller-Wille,
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Heredity Produced: at the crossroads of biology, politics, and culture, 1500–1870 (2007), p. 363;
Google Books.
Stewart, Ian B. "William Frédéric Edwards and the study of human races in France, from the Restoration to the July Monarchy." History of Science 58.3 (2020): 275–300.