[2] In addition to studying with Owen, Wyman also attended lectures by Achille Valenciennes, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Marie Jean Pierre Flourens, and Etienne Serres in Paris.

In a series of letters written between 1843 and 1848 to his Boston friend and fellow medical doctor, David Humphreys Storer, Wyman revealed his unhappiness with the quality of the school, the treatment of the professors, and life in the South.

After Wyman's death, his former student Burt G. Wilder eulogized him as "regarded by all as the highest anatomical authority in America, and the compeer of Owen, Huxley, and Gegenbauer in the Old World.

[10] Wyman's recognized authority as a comparative anatomist caused the coroner, Jabez Pratt, to call upon him to examine and testify about bones found in a furnace in November 1849.

[16] Wyman was a theist who attended the Unitarian Church at Harvard and, as such, leaned toward a belief in a "theistic, morphological form of evolution rather than natural selection.

Hunter Dupree and Toby Appel, disagreed as to Wyman's reception of Charles Darwin's theories of evolution and natural selection.

Dupree believed that Wyman's religious beliefs caused him to struggle with Darwin's theories, accepting them "only by intense effort both as a scientist and a person.

"[18] Appel made a case for Wyman as a proponent of philosophical anatomy at Harvard, along with his colleagues Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray.

"[19] When Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, Wyman's one-time mentor, Richard Owen came out against the book, while his colleague Asa Gray supported it.

In 1978, the Peabody Museum published Dear Jeffie, a collection of letters and sketches that Wyman had written to his son from 1866 to 1874 when he was doing fieldwork in the states and abroad.