John Thurnam (28 December 1810 – 24 September 1873) was an English psychiatrist, archaeologist, and ethnologist.
In 1848 he reported two maternal first cousins with an unusual condition affecting the skin, hair and teeth (an ectodermal dysplasia); he had performed an examination post mortem on one of the two men, including relevant histopathology.
The Wiltshire county asylum at Devizes was then being built, and the committee selected Thurnam to be medical superintendent.
Thurnam's leisure was devoted to statistical facts on mental illness and investigations of anthropological and antiquarian interest.
Thurnam with Dr. Joseph Barnard Davis published a work in two volumes under the title of Crania Britannica in 1865, important for craniometry.
Thurnam and Davis were both believers in polygenism, in the form that different races had been created separately.
[2] Two shorter papers were ‘Synostoses of the Cranial Bones regarded as a Race Character’ (Nat.