TURNER, WILLIAM

(b. Morpeth, Northumberland, England, 1508; d. London, England, 7 July 1568)

natural history, medicine.

Very little of what is recorded of Turner’s family and early life in the northern counties is other than conjectural. His first appearance in the official records is as a student of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, in 1526. He graduated B.A. in 1529/1530, and M.A. in 1533; he was a fellow of Pembroke Hall between 1530 and 1537, when he married Jane Auder of Cambridge. Under the influence of Hugh Latimer, Turner became an ardent religious reformer. His views were first made apparent in his translation of the Comparison Betwene the Olde Learnyng and the Newe (1537) by the German theologian Urbanus Regius.

Turner produced numerous religious tracts of the same fierce and uncompromising tone, concluding with A Newe Booke of Spirituall Physic (1555). His career was considerably affected by his extreme religious position. Although inclined from an early age to the tranquil study of natural history, he was forced by the threat of religious persecution to spend long periods in exile. During the first of these periods (1540–1546), Turner studied medicine in Italy, obtaining an M.D. at either Ferrara or Bologna, and traveled extensively in Germany and Switzerland, forming friendships with Konrad Gesner and other European naturalists. Having returned to England, Turner found that recognition came slowly. He was made dean of Wells Cathedral in 1551 and held this position until 1553. He incorporated for an M.D. at Oxford; Turner’s work on natural history shows a consistently medical bias, and he seems to have combined medical and clerical duties throughout his career. A second period of exile (1553–1558), following the death of Edward VI, was chiefly spent as a medical practitioner in Weissenburg. Although Turner’s foreign journeys were undertaken reluctantly out of necessity, they proved of inestimable value to his scientific work. He became fully acquainted with the Continental literature and with the latest trends in the research being conducted by the flourishing school of humanist naturalists. He was also able to extend his knowledge of the flora and fauna of Europe.

Some time after his second return to England, Turner was restored to the deanery of Wells. His final years were spent in the undisturbed study of botany, in collaboration with a wide circle of friends who ranged from apothecaries to gentleman patrons.

Turner’s vocation as a field naturalist emerged early. His publications include reference to material collected during his youth at Morpeth and as a student in East Anglia. At Cambridge he became dissatisfied with the derivative herbals and natural histories then in use, which gave little real impression of the local flora and fauna. He set out to produce reliable lists of English animals and plants using approved nomenclature based on classical sources and humanist usage. But Turner did not allow the scholarly aspect of his work to overshadow the results of his firsthand observations relating to morphology, distribution, behavior, and pharmacology. His main difficulty in carrying forward his botanical studies, in the troubled period of the Reformation, was in securing a subsistence and adequate toleration of his religious views. He made a modest beginning to his program with Libellus de re herbaria (1538), a list of 144 plants, the names of which were given in alphabetical order in Latin, with English and Greek synonyms. At this stage Turner had a good knowledge of the classical languages but not of the most recent work of humanist naturalists. This defect was supplied, and his next works written, during his periods in exile abroad. Avium Praecipuarum (1544) follows the pattern of the Libellus and is a tentative list of birds mentioned in Pliny and Aristotle, with identifications of northern European species. Turner’s information provides valuable evidence about the distribution of species during the sixteenth century. A further excursion into ornithology was his edition of the Dialogus de avibus et earum nominibus, written by his recently deceased friend Gisbert Longolius. Turner’s work on birds progressed no further, his attention turning instead to fishes, on which he composed a preliminary essay addressed to Konrad Gesner. This study was primarily a list of English fishes with notes on their distribution. It shows little acquaintance with the recent writings of Belon and Rondelet in ichthyology.

Turner was more successful in completing his botanical studies. No doubt inspired by the Continental herbalists, he composed a Latin herbal; but he abandoned this project after his first return to England, when he became convinced of the necessity of first studying the British flora in its entirety. He also decided to publish in the vernacular, recognizing the need to diffuse botanical and medical knowledge as widely as possible among his countrymen, even at the cost of limiting the European influence of his work. The Libellus was accordingly expanded into The Names of Herbes (1549). For this larger collection of species, Turner drew on his Continental experience to include German and French names, with details of distribution. This publication served as an advertisement for the first section of his New Herball (1551), in which plants were again listed alphabetically under their Latin names, for the letters from A to F. Synonyms were given in English and other languages. Turner’s descriptions were unorthodox, since he expressed these in vivid vernacular and usually included evidence drawn from firsthand observations. He showed little inclination to follow authorities and was scornful of much long-cherished herbal lore. The medical bias of the book was particularly marked, Turner intending it for use by apothecaries or laymen with medical interests. One unsatisfactory aspect of the Herball was the quality of its illustrations, which were poor copies of those in Leonhard Fuchs’s De historia stirpium (1542). Turner was also arbitrarily selective, including some quite rare herbaceous plants but omitting common trees, grasses, and sedges. His second exile delayed the latter part of the Herball until 1562. This section, from F to P, was improved by his more extensive knowledge of German plants and by his access to Pietro Mattioli’s translation of Dioscorides. He further reinforced the medical aspect of the work by including a treatise on baths, the first of numerous English works on this subject. Turner was mainly concerned with Bath, but he also made reference to baths in Italy and Germany. The first complete edition of the Herball appeared in 1568. Part I had been revised and expanded, Part II was unaltered, and a new Part III had been added to complete the alphabet. The quality of the descriptions was maintained: Turner wisely resisted the temptation to multiply species in the quest for encyclopedic coverage.

W. A. Cooke has estimated that Turner’s pioneering flora provided the first descriptions of a total of 238 species of native plants. The vernacular names coined by Turner for indistinctly recognized species have passed into general use. In spite of its originality, Turner’s work was not particularly well known to later botanists; Jean Bauhin and John Ray were exceptional in making active use of his Herball. It is evident that Turner’s great competence in botany carried over to other spheres of natural history. Only the turmoil of his life prevented him from expanding his informative essays on birds and fishes. The preface to The Names of Herbes and his letter appealing for patronage to Sir William Cecil (1550) indicate that he planned books on fished, stones, and minerals, and also a corrected translation of the New Testament. Turner’s liberal interests as a naturalist provided a blue print of the design for a system of nature that was made manifest by John Ray in the next century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A complete list of Turner’s works, including those not published, or lost, is given by Charles H. Cooper, Athenae Cantabrigenses, I (Cambridge, 1858), 256–259. Cooper lists thirty-four titles.

Turner’s botanical works are Libellus de re herbaria (London, 1538); reprinted with a biographical introduction by B. D. Jackson (London, 1877), who also gives a list of Turner’s works; The Names of Herbes in Greke, Latin, Englishe, Duch and Frenche (London, 1548/1549); reprinted, J. Britten, ed., English Dialect Society (London, 1882). The editions of Jackson and Britten have been reprinted, with a new introduction by W. T. Strean, by the Ray Society (London, 1965). Turner’s major botanical work is A new Herball Wherein are Conteyned the Names of Herbes [first part] (London, 1551); The Seconde Parte (Cologne, 1562), including “A Book of the Bath of Baeth“; The First and Seconde Partes of the Herbal . . . With the Third Parte (Cologne, 1568).

Turner’s zoological writings are Avium Praecipuarum quarum apud Plinium et Aristotelem mentio (Cologne, 1544); “Epistola Conrardo Gesnero,“in Konrad Gesner, Historia animalium, IV (Zurich, 1558), 1294–1297.

II. Secondary Lierature. See A arber, Herbals, Their Origin and Evolution, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1938); W. A. Cooke, First Records of British Flowering Plants 2nd ed. (London, 1900); T. P. Harrison, “William Turner, Naturalist and Priest,“in University of Texas Studies in English, XXXIII (1954), 1–12; Paulteney, Historical and Biographical Sketches of the Progress of Botany, I (London, 1790), 40–70; C. E. Raven, English Naturalists from Neckam to Ray (Cambridge, 1947), by far the most extensive account of Turner as a naturalist.

Charles Webster

TURNER, WILLIAM

(b Lancaster, England, 7 January 1832; d Edinburgh, Scotland, 15 February 1916)

anatomy, academic administration.

William Turner was a son of the cabinetmaker. The father died in 1837, and the boy was brought up in poor circumstances by his mother (Née margaret Aldren), a woman of strong character and simple faith. He was educated at a private school and apprenticed at the age of fifteen to Christopher Johnson, a local general medical practitioner.

At sixteen he proceeded to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, and qualified with the membership of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in the summer of 1853. His subsequent career was distinguished by parallel activities in both academic and administrative spheres.

In 1861 Turner became a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and followed Kelvin as its president in 1908. He was made fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1877, president of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1882 (although he never practiced medicine or surgery), president of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain in 1892, and president of the British Association at its Bradford meeting in 1900. He was knighted in 1886 and was president of the General Medical Council of Great Britain from 1898 to 1904.

Turner’s portrait, painted by Sir George Reid in 1895, shows a genial shrewd gentleman in characteristic pose. He was also painted in full academic dress by Sir James Guthrie in 1913; the portrait is now in the Court Room of the Old College, Edinburgh University.

In 1862 Turner married Anne Logan; they had three sons, two of whom practiced medicine, and two daughters.

One year after qualifying, on the recommendation of Sir James Paget, Turner was made senior demonstrator to John Goodsir, professor of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh. This school of anatomy was then the most distinguished in Britain. Turner succeeded to the chair in 1867, resigning only in 1903 when he took up the position of principal of the university, which he held until his death. He had then been a member of its Senate for forty-nine years.

In each of the bodies that he led, Turner’s intimate knowledge of medical legislation, his scientific attainments, and his force of character were used to carry through important programs and reforms. Thus in Edinburgh he was instrumental in raising funds needed for the building of the new university; and when reform of medical education became imperative in the 1880’s, Turner’s minority report to the Royal Commission of 1881 (the Medical Acts Commission) was ultimately used as the basis of the Medical Act of 1886, an enactment that still largely governs medical education in Britain. Curiously, for one with so enlightened an outlook. Turner was consistently against the education of women alongside men in medicine, although he would have agreed to the separate establishment of medical colleges for women.

At the same time as these multifarious duties, he conducted full scientific and teaching activities. Arthur Keith wrote “on the thread of his life [are] strung all the beads of British anatomy for half a century and more.” From his school at Edinburgh came graduates occupying no fewer than thirty-six chairs of anatomy, from Glasgow to Calcutta.

Turner inaugurated the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology in 1867 and was its editor for many years. In 1887 he and his friend and mentor George Murray Humphry, of Cambridge, founded the Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland. These were important events for the teaching and influence of British anatomy.

From 1854 onward Turner published many papers, taking anthropological and comparative anatomy as his main interests. His publications list contains 276 titles. Edinburgh anatomists had long taken a wide view of their subject, based upon comparative studies. Turner broadened this basis and British anthropology attained a new eminence in world science.

Turner used his knowledge of craniology to support Huxley’s defense of evolutionary theory, and his correspondence with Darwin (on rudimentary vestigial organs) is quoted by his son Logan Turner. Many of his observations were included in The Descent of Man. He was critical of Dubois’s work on Pithecanthropus erectus, which he did not see as a new species intermediate between man and ape, but, in the modern light, as an early evolutionary form.

This active, conscientious, able, and amiable man was another example of anatomist-administrator. He placed British anthropology on a new footing, and his teaching in the Edinburgh anatomy department greatly influenced other schools. But his most lasting contribution probably lay in the field of medical education, in which he carried his colleagues and the government with him in opposing a “one portal” system of entry into medicine. He insisted on the right of universities to grant their own medical degrees, while supporting the idea of joint qualifying boards outside the universities; for example, the Conjoint Board of the two royal colleges and the triple diploma of the Glasgow colleges. His concept still forms the basis of British qualification in medicine.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Turner’s 276 papers are in his List of Published Writings 1854–1910 (1915), of which copies are in the possession of his grandson and in the library of Edinburgh University. The subjects in this list include anatomy and physiology, comparative anatomy and zoology, pathological anatomy and anthropology, together with his many presidential addresses.

Among the titles may be noted Joseph Lister and William Turner, “Observations on the Structures of Nerve Fibres,” in Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science, 8 (1860), 29–34, also published separately (London, 1859); it includes a neat drawing by Lister himself. His long series of classical papers on the comparative anatomy of the placenta is exemplified by “Placentation in the Cetacea,” in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 26 (1871), 467–504.

The 1875 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica contains Turner’s article on “Anatomy,” the historical section of which is described by Garrison as the best monograph on the subject in English.

Anthropology is represented by The Comparative Osteology of the Races of Man, constituting parts XXIX and XLVII of the zoological series of the Scientific Results of the Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger (Edinburgh, 1884–1886). His many contributions to craniology include those on the “people of Scotland” and the “People of India,” in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, passim.

Turner’s collection of Cetacea made over fifty years is described in The Marine Mammals in the Anatomical Museum of the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1913).

A paper on “M. Dubois’ Description. . . . of pithecanthropus Erectus” is in Journal of Anatomy and Physiology, 29 (1895), 424–445.

II. Secondary Literature. The main source is the biography by his son A. Logan Turner, Sir William Turner, A Chapter in Medical History (London, 1919), many journal published obituary notices the fullest account being in British Medical Journal (1916), 1 , 326–331. Others may be found in Lancet (1916), 1 , 484–486; Nature, 96 (1916), 79; and The Student. Turner Memorial Number (11 July 1916), published by the Student’s Council, University of Edinburgh.

K. Bryn Thomas

TURNER, WILLIAM

Sixth bishop of Buffalo, N.Y., educator, author; b. Killmalloch, County Limerick, Ireland, April 8, 1871; d. Buffalo, July 10, 1936. He attended national schools and the Jesuit college at Mungret, Limerick. In 1888, he received his B.A. from the Royal University of Ireland, and the S.T.D. in 1893 from the North American College in Rome, winning the Benemerenti medal of the Roman Academy of St. Thomas for proficiency in philosophy. He was ordained in Rome at 22 for the Diocese of St. Augustine, Fla., on Aug. 13, 1893. His services were obtained by Abp. John Ireland of St. Paul, Minn., who installed him in his archdiocesan seminary in 1895 as chairman of the philosophy department. After further studies in Europe, he was appointed in 1906 to the chair of philosophy at the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., also serving as librarian. Two widely used textbooks issued from his classroom experience: History of Philosophy (1903), the first English textbook with a Catholic orientation on that subject, and Lessons in Logic (1911). He also wrote articles for the Catholic Mind and other publications, edited the American Ecclesiastical Review from 1914 to 1919, and was associate editor of the Catholic Historical Review from 1915 to 1918.

On March 10, 1919, he was chosen to succeed Bp. (later Cardinal) Dennis J. Dougherty as bishop of Buffalo. He was consecrated by Cardinal James Gibbons on March 29 and installed by Abp. (later Cardinal) Patrick Hayes on April 9. During his episcopacy he ordained 173 priests, created 30 new parishes, and was especially zealous in developing social services in his see. In 1923, he combined various charitable institutions, organizing the diocesan Catholic charities, which had raised several million dollars for the indigent by the time of his death. St. Vincent de Paul Society conferences were founded in all large parishes, as were numerous health facilities for undernourished children among his charges. He was honored in 1934 by the Italian government for his work among Italians in the U.S.

Bibliography: t. a. donohue, History: Diocese of Buffalo (Buffalo 1930). "Death of Bishop Turner of Buffalo," Catholic World 143 (Aug. 1936) 619–620. c. barry, The Catholic University of America, 1903–1909: The Rectorship of Denis J. O'Connell (Washington 1949).

[i. f. mogavero]

Turner, William

Turner, William, English singer and composer; b. Oxford, 1651; d. London, Jan. 13, 1740. He received training in music as a chorister under Edward Lowe at Christ Church, Oxford, then was a chorister at the Chapel Royal, where he collaborated with Blow and Humfrey on ’The Club Anthem” I will always give thanks; in 1666 he was placed in charge of Henry Cooke. He was master of the choristers at Lincoln Cathedral (1667-69), and in 1669 he became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, where he remained until his death. In 1672 he became a member of the King’s Private Musick; in 1683 he was made a vicar-choral at St. Paul’s Cathedral; in 1699 he became a lay vicar in the choir at Westminster Abbey. In 1696 he received the Mus.D. degree from the Univ. of Cambridge. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. Turner particularly distinguished himself as a composer for the church, producing more than 40 anthems, 3 services, a motet, hymns, and chants. Among his secular works are 2 odes, a cantata, many songs, a few pieces for theater productions, and 3 keyboard works.

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire