Lydia Folger Fowler (May 5, 1823[1] – January 26, 1879) was a pioneering American physician, professor of medicine, and activist.

[3] Other notable family members included her extended cousins Lucretia Coffin Mott and Maria Mitchell[2] and her paternal aunt Phebe Folger Coleman.

[4] She met Lorenzo at the house of her paternal uncle, Walter Folger, Jr., an "eccentric and famous astronomer-navigator in Nantucket".

[5] Lorenzo and his brother, Orson Squire Fowler, were well-known phrenologists; the New York Times noted in his obituary that "Prof. Fowler examined the heads of many distinguished men, among them Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, William Cullen Bryant, Baron Rothschild, Li Hung Chang, and Sir Henry Irving.

Lydia Fowler was the honorary secretary of the British Women's Temperance Association, and Jessie succeeded her mother in that position.

[7] Folger attended the Wheaton Female Seminary in Massachusetts when she was 16 years old and began teaching there in 1842 at the age of 20.

[11] Lydia Folger Fowler graduated as only the second woman in America to earn a medical degree, following Elizabeth Blackwell in 1849.

[13] Lydia practiced medicine with the outlook that science could improve female roles as children's caretakers.

[3] The first volume of History of Woman Suffrage, published in 1881, states, “THESE VOLUMES ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED TO THE Memory of Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Wright, Lucretia Mott, Harriet Martineau, Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Josephine S. Griffing, Martha C. Wright, Harriot K. Hunt, M.D., Mariana W. Johnson, Alice and Phebe Carey, Ann Preston, M.D., Lydia Mott, Eliza W. Farnham, Lydia F. Fowler, M.D., Paulina Wright Davis, Whose Earnest Lives and Fearless Words, in Demanding Political Rights for Women, have been, in the Preparation of these Pages, a Constant Inspiration TO The Editors”.