Joseph Towne

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Joseph Towne was born in Royston, a town in Hertfordshire, England. His father was a preacher at the local chapel, and gave Sunday-school lessons in a hall at the back of Towne's Yard. The Townes had many children, but this was a time of epidemics of smallpox, typhus and Asiatic cholera. Joseph was thus the youngest of five surviving children. His father played the organ in church, and encouraged the children to play music. Joseph learned to play the violin, and also experimented with making plaster-casts of his fingers and filling them with wax. Eventually, Joseph asked his father whether he could be apprenticed to a local artist. The father agreed, and the boy spent two years as an assistant sculptor.

When he was seventeen, Joseph Towne began work on a major project. It was the construction of a wax skeleton, even though he had never seen a real one. Working from books, he laboured on for two years before it was complete. Then, he went to Cambridge, where he tried to donate it to the medical-science museum. He was told "It is very artistic".

Towne wanted to be accurate rather than artistic, and asked what was wrong with it, so that he could put it right - but nobody could tell him. He had been informed that there was a Society of Arts competition in London, so he decided to go to London. In London, he visited doctors who examined it, but could not tell him whether it was correct or wrong. The time arrived when somebody advised him to ask Astley Cooper. In April 1825, Towne met the famous surgeon, who wrote out a note for him:


Signed Astley Cooper

His skeleton had not won the prize. It took second place. In the following year, a wax sculpture of a head dissection made for Hilton won the first prize.

The atmosphere at Guy's Hospital was poisonous with suspicion. Astley Cooper knew that it takes only one bad member of staff to wreck the entire hospital. He was therefore reluctant to hire anybody - but he trusted his unqualified bookkeeper Benjamin Harrison the Elder. The talents of Hodgkin caught the eye of the venerable Benjamin Harrison the Elder, who brought him down from Edinburgh to join the staff of Guy's. Astley Cooper seems to have intended to create a collection of wax medical models to rival the Florentine collection, because in 1825 he accepted Towne.














  1. ^ F.H. Thomas; F.L. Dimmick; S.M. Luria. "A study of binocular color mixture". Vision Research 1 (1–2). pp. 108–120. doi:10.1016/0042-6989(61)90023-2. 

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