page_title: William Henry Furness III
section_title: Personal
hierarchical_section_title: William Henry Furness III / Biography / Personal
caption_attribution_description: English: William Henry Furness III with tattoos Photo from 1890s in Yokohama, Japan
context_page_description: William Henry Furness III was an American physician, ethnographer and author from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was among the first to study and photograph the Kayan people of Borneo and the Wa'ab people on the island of Yap.
context_section_description: An 1894 article in The Oregonian described Furness as "the most artistically tattooed man in the world." It reported that during a long trip to Japan, he had been heavily tattooed: "[A] splendid representation of the Goddess of Love covers his chest, and the God of Thunder illuminates his back. Snakes and birds by the dozen mark his arms and thighs. A pagoda is designed on one shoulder and a fearful and wonderful collection of geometrical designs covers the other shoulder. A Chinese boat is tattooed on one leg, and a dragon looks from the other."
  His expeditions were underwritten by his father – his late mother had been heiress to an iron-making fortune and his father was a successful author. He never married, and lived at "Lindenshade," his parents' house in Wallingford. He provided some of the illustrations for the book String Figures and How to Make Them (1906), by his sister, ethnologist Caroline Furness Jayne. Following the deaths of Caroline in 1909 and her husband Horace Jayne in 1913, their teenage children – Kate Furness Jayne and Horace H. F. Jayne – lived with him at "Lindenshade."
  During World War I, he served as a captain in the U.S. Army Medical Corps and organized distribution of medical supplies. He donated the land for the Helen Kate Furness Free Library in Wallingford, named for his mother. He began collecting and editing his father's letters, but ill health forced him to abandon the project. It was completed by his nephew Horace.
  He is buried at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia in the Furness family plot, Section T, Lot 7.
caption: Furness in Yokohama, Japan in the 1890s
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