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Tilly Edinger was German and ended up at Harvard sometime before we did. Tilly was a sad person who didn’t pay much attention to kids. That doesn’t mean that she wasn’t nice. I just didn’t know. In the above photo, she is sitting on the right with Liska Deichmann. This clip is from the group photo from the Pelham summer outing mentioned elsewhere.
There was a kindness in Tilly, however, that reached out to our family. She liked dad based on their relationship at the museum. I wish I knew more about it. As a result, she gave us small gifts for Christmas. There were two that I particularly loved because they were novel. One was a small container of candied cherries. The other was a German Christmas cookie, which was crunchy and sweet, and I believe, gingery. The gifts impressed me. I didn’t know the woman but she exhibited a surprising graciousness by giving gifts to people she scarcely knew.
As a teenager I had no clue what she was about, so I just did a HOLLIS search at the Harvard site and found 50 publications. The list reveals that she was a paleontologist interested in cranial and neural anatomy and physiology. Here are several of her publications:
--“Paleoneurology 1804-1966 : an annotated bibliography”
--“Brains from 40 million years of camelid history”.
--“Fossils and neuropathology.”
I forgot to get the publications and dates but these titles serve to illustrate the range of her interests. That strikes me as pretty heady stuff for that far back in paleontology for women. Perhaps I’m wrong, just an impression of a teen age kid.
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