COMBE, Andrew, MAE. (1797-1847), was born in Edinburgh, 27th October 1797. His name holds an honoured place in the roll of sanitary reformers. Instead of waiting till disease was developed, he sought its prevention by the adoption of a careful system of hygiene. He served an apprenticeship in a surgery, and in 1817 passed at Surgeons’ Hall. He proceeded to Paris to complete his medical studies, and whilst there he investigated phrenology on anatomical principles. He became convinced of the truth of the new science, and, as he acquired much skill in the dissection of the brain, he subsequently gave additional interest to the lectures of his brother George, by his practical demonstrations of the convolutions. He returned to Edinburgh in 1819 with the intention of beginning practice; but being attacked by the first symptoms of pulmonary disease, he was obliged to seek health in the south of France and in Italy during the two following winters. He began to practise in 1823, and by careful adherence to the laws of health he was enabled to fulfil the duties of his profession for nine years. During that period he assisted in editing the Phrenological Journal and contributed a number of articles to it, defended phrenology before the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh,.published his Observations on Mental Derangement (1831), and prepared the greater portion of his Principles of Physiology Applied to Health. The latter work was issued in 1834, and immediately obtained extensive public favour. In 1836 he was appointed physician to Leopold I., king of the Belgians, and removed, to Brussels. He had only been there a few months, however, when another severe attack of haemoptysis warned him that the climate was unsuitable, and would speedily render him unequal to the duties of his ...position. Scrupulously conscientious in everything, he at once resigned. The king and Baron Stockmar persuaded him to remain a few weeks longer in the hope that he might recover; but they were disappointed. He continued, however, to hold the position of consulting physician to his majesty. In Edinburgh he proceeded to work with renewed energy; he published his Physiology of Digestion, and resumed practice as a consulting physician, his advice being eagerly sought by old and new patients and by his professional brethren. In 1838 he was appointed one of the physicians extraordinary to the queen in Scotland. Two years later he completed. his Physiological and Moral Management of Infancy, which he believed to be his best work, and it was his last. He suffered at intervals from extreme weakness, and iu 1842 the symptoms became alarming. His latter years were mostly occupied in seeking at various health resorts some alleviation of his disease; he spent two winters in Madeira, and tried a voyage to the L τ nited States, but was compelled to return within a few weeks of the date of his landing at New York. He went on a visit to a nephew at Gorgie, near Edinburgh, and there he died on the 9th August 1847. His last literary effort was a paper on ship-fever, which was published in the Times after his death; its principal suggestions have been carried out by the Act 12 and 13 Vict. c. 23. His biography, written by George Combe, was published in 1850.
COMBE, George (1788-1858), was born in Edinburgh, 21st October 1788. As the first advocate in this country of the phrenological doctrines of Gall and Spurzheim. and as the author of The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects, he attracted much attention in Britain, on the Continent, and in America. His father was a brewer,—a man of shrewd business qualities, and of a benevolent disposition, and a strict observer of Calvinistic practices; and his children—nine daughters and eight sons—-were placed under a rigid system of religious instruction. In a fragment of autobiography written by Combe shortly before his death, he complains of the irksomeness of the Sunday observances and tasks imposed on his father’s household. His frame was feeble; the Sunday tasks followed weeks of severe mental labour at school, and, so far from cultivating in him a religious spirit, they rendered the church, Sunday, and the Catechism sources of weariness and terror to him. His character was earnest and thoughtful even as a child; and feelings of despondency thus engendered were intensified by the weakness of his constitution. His mind became largely occupied with the current theological theories and, in time, with doubts of their truth. He attended the High School for five years, and then proceeded to the university. In 1804 he entered a lawyer’s office as an apprentice, and applied himself diligently to the acquirement of the details of his profession. At the same time he assisted his younger brothers and sisters in their studies, and read philosophy, history, and general literature; philosophical works, however, had most attraction for him. In 1812 he obtained his commission as writer to the signet, and, soon after, that of notary public. His shrewdness and conscientiousness in dealing with clients speedily obtained for him a degree of practice which exceeded his expectations. Meanwhile, in private, he had vague yearnings to accomplish something which might benefit mankind. In 1815 the Edinburgh Review contained an article on Gall and Spurzheim’s system of ,, ' craniology,” which the reviewer denounced as “a piece of thorough quackery from beginning to end.” Combe laughed like others at the absurdities of this so-called pew theory of the brain, and thought that it must be finally exploded after such an exposure; and when Dr Spurzheim delivered lectures in Edinburgh, in refutation of the statements of his critic, Combe considered the subject unworthy of serious attention. He was, however, invited to a friend’s house where he saw Spurzheim dissect the brain, and he was so far impressed by the demonstration that he attended the second course of lectures. Proceeding tö investigate the subject for himself, he became satisfied, after two years of study and observation, that the fundamental principles of phrenology were true—namely “that the brain is the organ of mind; that the brain is an aggregate of several parts, each subserving a distinct mental faculty; and that the size of the cerebral organ is, caeteris paribus, an index of power or energy of function.” He had moved slowly at first; he now pursued his investigations with enthusiasm. He compared the known characteristics of friends with their phrenological developments; he studied anatomy; he visited schools, prisons, and large manufactories; and he became more and more satisfied that he was approaching a truth which would be of great value to humanity. He requested his brother Dr Andrew Combe— who was at that time a medical student in Paris—to give particular attention to the dissection of the brain, in order to be prepared to support or to condemn the new theories on anatomical principles. In 1817 his first essay on phrenology was published in the Scots Magazine; and a series of papers on the same subject appeared soon afterwards in the Literary anì Statistical Magazine; these were collected aud published in 1819 in book form as Essays on Phrenology. His friends became alarmed by his public advocacy of a cause which was the laughing-stock of all men of reputation, and warned him that it would be the ruin of his professional prospects; He was not diverted from his course, and he had the satisfaction of finding his business increase; for the many who laughed at his hobby or regretted it still recognized his assiduity in attending to the affairs of his clients. The Essays gave an extraordinary impetus to the new science; friends and foes became numerous; a phrenological society was founded; the Phrenological Journal was established, and was published quarterly for twenty years; a volume of Phrenological Transactions was issued; and Combe’s first work developed into A System of Phrenology in two large volumes, of which five editions have been published. By his lectures and writings he attracted public attention to the subject on the Continent and in America, as well as at home; and a long discussion with Sir William Hamilton in 1827-28 excited general interest.
The publication of his most popular work, The Constitution of Man, was determined upon after serious deliberation. He had circulated private copies amongst his friends, several of whom regarded the principles of the essay as dangerous to society and urged him to suppress it. The principle on which he based his argument was that all the laws of nature were in harmony with each other, and that man would best fulfil God’s will, and attain the greatest happiness for himself, by discovering those laws and obeying them. He saw nothing irreligious in this principle; he believed that on the contrary it supplied a philosophic basis to religion. When the book was published in 1828, he was charged by the church party with being a materialist and an atheist; but, on the other hand, he received from near and distant quarters grateful thanks for the new light his work had shed upon religion, and for the satisfaction it afforded to doubting minds. As one indication of the estimation which the work obtained, it is notable that amongst many editions in America there was one for the blind. From this date the current of Combe’s public life broadened; he became strong in his own convictions of the truth, and consequently more resolute in carrying them to practical issues. He might hesitate at first,.doubting himself; but once satisfied that he was right, he never faltered. He saw everything by the light of phrenology, and the light rendered him patient of the opposition of others, and guided him to the most earnest efforts to benefit his fellow-creatures, morally and socially. He gave time, labour, and money to help forward the education of the poorer classes; he established the first infant school in Edinburgh under the direction of Mr Wilderspin; and he originated a series of evening lectures on chemistry, physiology, history, and moral philosophy— the lectures on the latter subject being delivered by himself. He studied the criminal classes, and tried to solve the problem how to reform as well as to punish them; and he strove to introduce into lunatic asylums a humane system of treatment. In 1836 he offered himself as a candidate for the chair of logic in the Edinburgh University, and the testimonials submitted on his behalf on that occasion show that he was held in high esteem by men of very opposite opinions. As he had expected, he was rejected by the town council in favour of Sir William Hamilton.
Having received numerous invitations to visit America, he proceeded thither in 1838, and about two years were occupied in lecturing in the principal States on phrenology, education, and the treatment of the criminal classes. On his return in 1840 he published his Moral Philosophy, and iu the following year his Notes on the United States of North America. In 1842 he delivered, in German, a course of twenty-two lectures in the university of Heidelberg—being the first Englishman who had ventured to lecture there in the national language. But the effort resulted in an illness which prostrated him for some time. He continued to travel much on the Continent—inquiring into the management of schools, prisons, and asylums. The commercial crisis of 1855 elicited his remarkable pamphlet on The Currency Question. The culmination of the religious thought and experience of his life is contained in his work On the Relation between Science and Religion, first publicly issued in 1857, and now in its fifth edition. Writing pamphlets, contributing to periodicals, lecturing, and correcting the new editions of his works rendered his days busy to the last. He was engaged in revising the ninth edition of the Constitution of Man when he died at Moor Park, Farnham, 14th August 1858. He had married in 1833 Cecilia Siddons, a daughter of the great actress. She had been the companion of all his travels, and she was with him at the end. Apart from his position as a phrenologist he earned distinction by his efforts on behalf of education, and by his courage in promulgating certain philosophic truths, which at the time were regarded as subversive of everything good, but are now accepted so entirely as matters of course that his share in obtaining recognition for them is apt to be forgotten. (c. G.)
COMBE, William (1741-1823), an anonymous hack writer of great fertility and of some merit, was born at Bristol in 1751. The circumstances of his birth and parentage are somewhat doubtful, and it is questioned whether his father was a rich Bristol merchant, or a certain William Alexander, a London alderman, who died in 1763. Be this as it may, it is certain that Combe was educated at Eton, with Fox, Lyttelton, and William Beckford; that Alexander bequeathed him some £2000—a little fortune that soon disappeared in a course of splendid extravagance, which gained him the nickname of Count Combe; and that he finally fixed his residence in London (about 1771), as a law student and bookseller’s hack. In 1775 he published The Philosopher in Bristol, a series of essays of merely local interest; and in 1776 he made his first success in London with The Diaboliad, a satire full of bitter personalities. Four years afterwards (1780) he became an inmate of the King’s Bench; and much of his subsequent life was spent in prison. He appears to have written a correspondence between Sterne and Eliza Draper, and also the Letters of the Late Lord Lyttelton (1780). Periodical literature of all sorts—pamphlets, satires, burlesques, “two thousand columns for the papers,” “two hundred biographies,” The Origin of Commerce— filled up the next years, and about 1789 Combe was receiving £200 yearly from Pitt. Six volumes of a Devil on Two Sticks in England caused him to be saluted as “the English Le Sage;” in 1794-96 he wrote the text for Boydell’s History of the River Thames; in 1803, he was placed on The Times. In 1807 All the Talents, a satire, appeared; it ran through twenty editions and is generally attributed to Combe. In 1809-11 he wrote for Ackermann’s Political Magazine the famous Three Tours of Dr Syntax, which, owing greatly to Rowlandson’s designs, had an immense success. Then came poems in illustration of drawings by Princess Elizabeth, The Military Adventures of Johnny Neucome (1815), The English Dance of Death (1815-16), The Dance of Life (1816-17), The Adventures of Johnny Quae Genus (1822)—all written for Rowlandson’s caricatures; together with Histories of Oxford and Cambridge, Picturesque Tours along the Rhine and other rivers, Histories of Madeira, Antiquities of York, texts for Turner’s Southern Coast Views, and contributions innumerable to the Literary Repository. In his later years, notwithstanding a by no means unsullied character, Combe was courted for the sake of his charming conversation and inexhaustible stock of anecdote. He is said to have written and burned his autobiography; but it does not appear that the loss of this memorial is to be regretted. He died in London in 1823.
Brief obituary memoirs of Combe appeared in Ackermann’s Literary Repository and in the Gentleman's Magazine for August 1823; and in May 1859 a list of his works, drawn up by his own hand, was printed in the latter periodical. See also Diary of H. Crabb Robinson, Notes and Queries for 1869, and a paper in the Churchman's Shilling Magazine for the same year.
