Amelia Bloomer is a name that many people who study women’s history even a little bit tend to know. She’s the namesake of “bloomers,” a style of dress that became popular among women’s rights advocates and dress reformers in the 19th century. Bloomer, the woman, didn’t invent the costume, but she was an early and ardent advocate of them and as a result, gave her name to the style. Bloomers consisted of a loosely fitting coat or dress that reached below the knees and a pair of billowing pants similar to Turkish trousers (picture MC Hammer or the Disney-fied Aladdin) gathered at the ankles.

Although widely associated with women’s rights, bloomers were actually one of the treatment outfits for those taking a water cure. Hydropathy, as the water-cure system, was known was a popular form of medical therapy in the United States from the 1820s to the 1860s. The basic idea was that cold water was pure and clean and could therefore cure just about any disease. People “took” water in any number of ways but the most common was a wet sheet that would be wrapped around a patient for several hours until he or she sweated. An alternative to the sheet was a wet dress, which was introduced at a hydropathic institute and later became the model of the bloomer costume. Women who took the water cure often sometimes cut their hair short for easy drying and felt themselves free from the prevailing and restrictive women’s fashion.

The wet dress was introduced to the fashion world by Elizabeth Smith who displayed her fashion to women’s rights leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Amelia Bloomer discovered it when Stanton came for a visit and she soon began writing about it enthusiastically in her magazine, The Lily. Articles on the bloomer trend were soon picked up by other publications and it came to be dubbed “bloomers” for Bloomer’s advocacy of it for women. Bloomer herself along with other wearers of bloomers suffered merciless ridicule for their fashion choice.

The bloomers adoption by the women’s rights movement also damaged its reputation among hydropaths. Bloomers came to be associated with female radicalism and its followers were suspected of free love and of a desire to be free of all feminine graces.

Amelia Bloomer mostly abandoned the bloomer in 1859 but she continued to fight for women’s rights and for more sensible, less restrictive clothing for women for the rest of her life.

Today, when you tell someone to “get his or her head examined,” you are usually implying that they are crazy. But the phrase had real currency in the 19th century. People really did get their heads examined–but not to find out they were crazy.

The phrase actually comes from the antebellum phrenology fad when people–all kinds of people, from president James Garfield to Walt Whitman–got their heads “read.”Phrenologists could read your character, including what you are good at and what weren’t, by looking at the bumps on your head. Supposedly, Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross, and Ulysses S. Grant even picked their careers based on a head reading. Forget What Color is Your Parachute? In the 19th century, it was What Bumps are on My Brain?

Phrenology offered physical “proof” of your internal self. That was part of its appeal in an age when everyone was driven to “know thyself.”Your whole self could be understood by the landscape of your scalp, a powerful idea with incredible potential for making the world work better.

Not everyone thought phrenology was a great idea, though. Lots of people thought it was a crazy idea, which is likely where the phrase “getting your head examined” got it’s uncomplimentary overtones.

In 1844, Lydia Folger married Lorenzo Niles Fowler in Nantucket. Fowler was, with his brother Orson Squire, the foremost proponents of phrenology in the United States, so it should probably come as no surprise that some head reading occurred at the ceremony. Lorenzo read the bumps on the head of Lydia’s uncle Walter, declaring, so the story goes, that his ego was nearly as large as his genius.

I ran across this story on the website of the Nantucket Historical Society while looking up more about Lydia Folger Fowler. Lydia was a remarkable woman. The second woman to graduate from medical school in the United States (and the first American-born–Elizabeth Blackwell was English), she lectured extensively on health, anatomy, physiology, and hygiene in addition to practicing medicine. She wrote books and taught courses to women.

In her lectures to women, Lydia praised their roles as mothers but also urged them to think about the other years of their lives, those not tied to child bearing and raising. She told them that an educated mother made the best mother. She constantly emphasized how important it was for individuals to study, practice, and perfect themselves. This was especially important for mothers, Lydia said, who had a responsibility to more than merely caretakers of their children and husbands.

Lydia’s story is little known, in part, because of her gender but also because of her marriage to one of the famous Fowler brothers. She was also the cousin of a much more famous woman: Lucretia Mott, the famed Quaker woman’s rights advocate.  But she made important contributions to the history of women and medicine. And who could forget a wedding that involved head bump reading?