Hints Toward Physical Perfection

Title continues: "Or, The Philosophy of Human Beauty; Showing How to Acquire and Retain Bodily Symmetry, Health, and Vigor, Secure Long Life, and Avoid the Infirmities and Deformities of Age." Describes the "perfect" man or woman, effects of "mental culture," "moral and emotional influences," social conditions and occupations, effects of climate and locality, practical hygiene, womanhood, the secret of longevity, the arts of beauty, etc. John Lemuel Capen, Philadelphia phrenologist, was born in Dorchester, Mass., circa 1823 and died 1905. Capen received his M.D. from Hahnemann Medical College in 1875 and, specializing in nervous diseases, maintained a Philadelphia practice until his death. He was trained in phrenology at the New York office of Fowler and Wells and assumed the direction of the firm’s Philadelphia branch in 1856. The author, Daniel Harrison Jacques (1825-77), was a physician but does not mention phrenology in this text. Index. 12 p. of publisher's ads at rear.