Phrenological Character of Harriet E. Horr, given by Lucretia Bradley Hubbell Dec. 2, 1863. [manuscript cover title]

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Handwritten phrenological analysis of a woman by Lucretia Bradley Hubbell of Norwich, Connecticut. Hubbell—a physician/phrenologist, popular phrenological lecturer, noted balloonist, and friend of Civil War surgeon and woman’s suffragist Dr. Mary Edwards Walker—here provides Harriet E. Horr with medical advice and a full phrenological report, advising Horr to consider the profession of bookbinder.

Hubbel notes Horr’s naturally strong constitution and large brain (“predominating in the moral organs”), advises her on her diet, etc. and describes such phrenological aspects as affection, perseverance, ambition, conscientiousness, “combativeness and destructiveness,” benevolence, and initiation. Hubbell writes:

You have good Initiation and are desirous of reading and imitating characters of a moral tone. Initiation combines more with the moral powers than with the mechanical, still you can improve on a pattern better than go without one. ... You would be plain and pathetic as a friend and descriptive as a writer, but more for facts than theory. You like the practical; you can better succeed in the plain branches than in mathematics and, the abstruse sciences. You would do well in tailoring and book-binding. (ff[7–9])

“A sport balloonist, [Lucretia Bradley Hubbell] purchased a hot air balloon and in March of 1855 made her solo ascension, becoming the first woman in the country to do so. ... She later purchased another balloon which she stationed at Almyra, New York during the state fair and invested money for the building of a scientific machine to manufacture gas on an improved plan.”¹ In 1871, the American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb (Vol. XVI, No. 1) noted Hubbell’s psychological and medical treatment of a young deaf man in Norwich, enabling him to hear “...the sounds of the human voice distinctly, [imitating] them with a precision perfectly astonishing.”

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