Choice of Pursuits; Or, What to Do, and Why, Describing Seventy-Five Trades and Professions, and the Talents and Temperaments Required for Each; Also, ... Proper Work. Together With Portraits and..
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He was born on May 27, 1812 in Chester, Massachussets, United States. He was descended from Anthony de Zocieur, a French sailor from the island of Terceira, who took the name Sizer after he settled in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1726. His grandfather, William Sizer, was an ingenious Jack-of-all-trades whose most notable exploit occurred during the Revolution when he inoculated four men with a jack-knife, and carried them through smallpox with butternut physic made into pills by boiling the juice. His father, Fletcher Sizer, was married to Lydia Bassett, of Westfield, Massachussets.
Reared among the Berkshire Hills, he wrote for country newspapers until he came under the influence of the phrenologist, J. G. Spurzheim, who came to the United States in 1832.
Education
He studied phrenology, lecturing after 1839 in the South and East.
Career
In 1849 he became examiner in the famous phrenological cabinet of Orson Squire Fowler and Samuel Roberts Wells in New York City. He examined the heads of nearly three hundred thousand persons.
From 1859 to 1863 he edited the American Phrenological Journal, which, under his editorship, was a dignified periodical. He became president of the American Institute of Phrenology, founded in 1866, with Amos Dean and Horace Greeley among the corporate members. Sizer was the principal lecturer at the Institute, which, at the time of his death, had graduated 731 students.
Of the first sort are Heads and Faces, and How to Study Them (1885), and How to Study Strangers by Temperament, Face, and Head (1895). On education, he published How to Teach According to Temperament and Mental Development (1877). On vocational guidance, he contributed What to Do, and Why (1872), and The Road to Success (1885). His Forty Years in Phrenology (1882) is a volume of recollections of his life work.