The school had been leased for a period of seven years to a very
delightful successor, it being rightly supposed that after that time
my brother would wish to assume the responsibility.
Some of the subjects for the London matriculation were quite new to
me, especially "English." But with the fresh incentive and new vision
of responsibility I set to work with a will, and soon had mastered the
ten required subjects sufficiently to pass the examination with
credit. But I must say here that Professor Huxley's criticisms of
English public school teaching of that period were none too stringent.
I wish with all my heart that others had spoken out as bravely, for in
those days that wonderful man was held up to our scorn as an atheist
and iconoclast. He was, however, perfectly right. We spent years of
life and heaps of money on our education, and came out knowing nothing
to fit us for life, except that which we picked up incidentally.
I now followed my father to London, and found every subject except my
chemistry entirely new. I was not familiar with one word of botany,
zoology, physics, physiology, or comparative anatomy. About the
universe which I inhabited I knew as little as I did about cuneiform
writings. Except for my mathematics and a mere modicum of chemistry I
had nothing on which to base my new work; and students coming from
Government free schools, or almost anywhere, had a great advantage
over men of my previous education; I did not even know how to study
wisely. Again, as Huxley showed, medical education in London was so
divided, there being no teaching university, that the curriculum was
ridiculously inadequate. There were still being foisted upon the world
far too many medical men of the type of Bob Sawyer.
There were fourteen hospitals in London to which medical schools were
attached. Our hospital was the largest in the British Isles, and in
the midst of the poorest population in England, being located in the
famous Whitechapel Road, and surrounded by all the purlieus of the
East End of the great city. Patients came from Tilbury Docks to
Billingsgate Market, and all the river haunts between; from Shadwell,
Deptford, Wapping, Poplar, from Petticoat Lane and Radcliffe Highway,
made famous by crime and by Charles Dickens. They came from Bethnal
Green, where once queens had their courts, now the squalid and crowded
home of poverty; from Stratford and Bow, and a hundred other slums.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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