By KELLY SULLIVAN
Around the year 1800, a German physician had a revelation. No one had yet been able to explain why each human being was so different; why some reacted to certain situations one way while others reacted another way; why some had talents others did not, why some were prone to certain illnesses or lacked self-esteem. His revelation supplied the answer to those questions. The physician theorized that the brain actually held 27 different organs and that each organ was responsible for a specific trait or behavior. The instinct to reproduce, the love of one’s children, pride, vanity, and the compulsion for self-defense were just some of the many purposes of these parts of the brain.
At the time, people believed that each person’s cranial organs varied in size and shape and that the skull conformed to those specific dimensions. Therefore, according to the theory, manually feeling a person’s head with all its bumps and fissures, could explain traits and behaviors and predict the individual’s future reactions to stimuli. This theory and its practice came to be known as phrenology. Twenty years later, a Quaker family in Hopkinton probably had no idea that the little girl they had just brought into the world would become a leading authority on the subject.
Lucretia Bradley was born in Hopkinton on May 7, 1821, to Joshua and Dorcas (Rathbun) Bradley. After graduating from high school, she began working as a book agent for Henry Bill Publishing in Norwich, Conn., but discovered she had a deep interest in phrenology. She soon moved to New York to study under Nelson Sizer, an author, professor and president of the American Institute of Phrenology.
Sensing that there was a connection between the brain and illness, she decided to study medicine as well. John Bovies Dodds of Brooklyn became her instructor. For the next twenty years, Lucretia toured the country, giving lectures on the direct connection between an individual’s brain and their physical ailments. She claimed she could detect disease in a person by simply feeling their skull. She took part in many public debates, as medical doctors felt phrenology was a bunch of nonsense and phrenologists were merely quacks.
Lucretia was known for being eclectic and independent in an age where proper women did not possess those traits. She traveled alone and slept in barns, often on the hard ground when no shelter could be found. In 1855, she decided to show even more independence when she made plans to take a trip in a hot air balloon. The balloon had originally been made for John Wise, a famous aeronaut. He was scheduled to go up in the balloon at the grand opening celebration of the Crystal Palace, an exhibition building in New York. However, Wise’s plans changed when the completion of the balloon was delayed.
Lucretia got possession of the flying machine and took off into the air. About 11 miles into her journey, the balloon exploded. Grabbing hold of the damaged pieces, she used them as a parachute which gently lowered her to the ground. It took twenty minutes for help to arrive at the field where she had landed. It was assumed she would need medical care, but instead Lucretia was found calmly gathering the shredded balloon and folding it all together.
At the age of 37, she married 21-year-old Algernon Sidney Hubbell, a portrait painter and inventor. Algernon’s father Richard was also an inventor and the two men patented and manufactured many items including a bench vice and folding pocket umbrellas. Algernon’s mother died the year following his marriage, and his father lived out the rest of his life with the couple. The trio eventually moved to Norwich, where Lucretia continued working as a phrenological physician, and selling medicines she had patented.
She and her husband became members of the Seventh Day Baptist Church of Westerly, maintaining her beliefs in the great power of spirituality.
She also began to author books concerning the body and how illnesses should be treated in a spiritual rather than surgical way. Fascinated by the spleen, which she called a mystical organ, she penned, “All medical schools have failed to discover for what purpose this organ was made, being the only organ that has not been fully explained. And as God must have had some object in creating this organ, I have been lead to study and investigate it.” She condemned surgical procedures being done on the spleen, and the doctors who performed such operations. “Would you put your clock in the hands of a man who did not understand the pendulum?” she asked her readers.
Lucretia outlived her nine siblings although she went blind three years before her death. Suffering from dropsy in her final three months, she needed round-the-clock care. She died at 6:30 a.m. on a Monday morning at her home in Norwich. She was almost 90 years old.
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