William Herbert Sheldon

William Herbert Sheldon Jr. (November 19, 1898 to September 17, 1977) was an American psychologist, numismatist and eugenicist who created somatotyping and constitutional psychology, which tried to correlate body types with temperament. Born in Pawtuxet, Rhode Island, he studied at Brown University, earned a doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1925 and a medical degree there in 1933, and then studied under Carl Jung in Europe. He moved to Harvard in 1938 and later directed the Constitutional Laboratory at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. His method classified people as endomorphic, mesomorphic or ectomorphic from photographs and measurements of nude students at Ivy League schools, a program that became controversial. Aldous Huxley popularized his ideas. In numismatics Sheldon wrote Early American Cents and Penny Whimsy and devised the 1 to 70 Sheldon coin grading scale, but after his death he was accused of swapping coins from the American Numismatic Society with his own, and his anti-Semitic attitudes led to his dismissal from a university. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts.