Sir William Henry Flower (30 November 18311 July 1899) was an English surgeon, museum curator and comparative anatomist, who became a leading authority on mammals and especially on the primate brain. He supported Thomas Henry Huxley in an important controversy with Richard Owen about the human brain and eventually succeeded Owen as Director of the Natural History Museum in London. Origins Born on 30 November 1831 in his father's house at Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, he was the second son of Selina née Greaves (d. 1884), eldest daughter of Mary Whitehead and John Greaves, and Edward Fordham Flower, founder of the town brewery. His grandfather Richard Flower had married Elizabeth Fordham and settled at Albion, Illinois, where his father grew up. His uncles included the slate entrepreneur John Whitehead Greaves and William Pickering, Governor of Washington. His elder brother Charles Edward Flower ran the family brewery with the third brother Edgar Flower, while he chose a scientific career. Early life First taught at home by his mother, he went to a school in Edgbaston at the age 11 and then from age 13 to a Pestalozzian school at Worksop under a Swiss headmaster, Dr B. Heldenmaier. There were ten hours schooling each day which included, rare at that time, science. Already a collector of natural history objects, he was made curator of the school museum and for almost all the rest of his life was a museum curator of one kind or another. He then attended University College, London, followed by the Middlesex Hospital, where he studied medicine and surgery. Graduating as an MB of London University in 1851, he won a gold medal in physiology and a silver in zoology and comparative anatomy. In 1852 he read his first paper before the Zoological Society of London, of which he was made a Fellow. Medical career Appointed a junior house surgeon at the Middlesex Hospital, after six months he was promoted to senior house surgeon and in 1854 passed the exam to become an MRCS (Member of the Royal College of Surgeons). Also in 1854 he became Curator of the Middlesex Hospital Museum. However, with the outbreak of the Crimean War that year, he joined the British Army and was appointed as Assistant-Surgeon to the 63rd (West Suffolk) Regiment of Foot. Embarking at Cork in July 1854, they sailed for Constantinople and then on to the Crimea, landing at Kalamita Bay