Frederic William Henry Myers

(1843–1901). British writer, born at Keswick. He was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became friendly with Edmund Gurney and Henry Sidgwick, who became the first president of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882. Myers was interested in spiritualism several years before the SPR was founded. Professionally, he was a school inspector, and a prolific if not particularly good poet. His magnum opus is the remarkable Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (2 vols., 1903). Here he discusses hundreds of cases of phenomena such as 'fantasms of the dead', 'automatism', 'trance states', 'possession', and 'disintegrations of personality', as well as hypnotism.

(Published 1987)

— Richard L. Gregory

Bibliography
• Hall, T. H. (1964). The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney.

---