Quick Facts
Biography
Agnes Sillars Hamilton (1790s – October 22, 1870) was a Scottish phrenologist.
Life
She was born in about 1794 and her parents were Jane (born MacDougall) and Archibald Sillars. In 1819 she was married to Edward Hamilton and they had a son, Archibald Sillars Hamilton.
She comes to notice in 1832 when she was known as a lecturer on politics. She moved to the subject of women's equality and then onto phrenology. By the 1840s she was reported as dealing in "practical phrenology". Hamilton would use a group of marbles to illustrate the principles of phrenology. Over 15 years she said that she had analysed the heads of 60,000 people as she toured throughout Britain and Ireland. Where she gathered interest she may spend some months in that town but in other cases she would quickly move on.
She was well received but she was not able to retire and she attracted varying reviews from acknowledged phrenologists George Combe and Andrew Combe of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society. One account notes her as a "dirty old wench".
Her son Archibald Sillars Hamilton was a phrenologist in his twenties and he left for Australia in 1854 where he continued that profession. Archibald was given the head of Ned Kelly after his death and he published an account of the skull's phrenology.
Hamilton died in Edinburgh in 1870.