Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 3Huxley, Thomas Henry
History
Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley — Volume 3
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1825-1895; Naturalists -- England -- Biography
How is that to be transacted whether as in-patient or out-patient at
Firdale? Much hospitality hath made thee mad.
Seriously, it's not to be done nohow. What between papers that don't
come, and profligate bracket manufacturers who keep you waiting for
months and then send the wrong things--and a general tendency of
everybody to do nothing right or something wrong--it is as much as the
two of us will do--to get in, and all in the course of the next three
weeks.
Of course my wife has no business to go to London to superintend the
packing--but I should like to see anybody stop her. However, she has
got the faithful Minnie to do the actual work; and swears by all her
Gods and Goddesses she will only direct.
It would only make her unhappy if I did not make pretend to believe,
and hope no harm may come of it.
Tout a vous,
T.H. Huxley.
[Another discussion which sprang up in the "Times", upon Medical
Education, evoked a letter from him ("Times" August 7), urging that the
preliminary training ought to be much more thorough and exact. The
student at his first coming is so completely habituated to learn only
from books or oral teaching, that the attempt to learn from things and
to get his knowledge at first hand is something new and strange. Thus a
large proportion of medical students spend much of their first year in
learning how to learn, and when they have done that, in acquiring the
preliminary scientific knowledge, with which, under any rational system
of education, they would have come provided.
He urged, too, that they should have received a proper literary
education instead of a sham acquaintance with Latin, and insisted, as
he had so often done, on the literary wealth of their own language.
Every one has his own ideas of what a liberal education ought to
include, and a correspondent wrote to ask him, among other things,
whether he did not think the higher mathematics ought to be included.
He replied:--]
Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, August 16, 1890.
I think mathematical training highly desirable, but advanced
mathematics, I am afraid, would be too great a burden in proportion to
its utility, to the ordinary student.
I fully agree with you that the incapacity of teachers is the weak
point in the London schools. But what is to be expected when a man
accepts a lectureship in a medical school simply as a grappling-iron by
which he may hold on until he gets a hospital appointment?
Medical education in London will never be what it ought to be, until
the "Institutes of Medicine," as the Scotch call them, are taught in
only two or three well-found institutions--while the hospital schools
are confined to the teaching of practical medicine, surgery,
obstetrics, and so on.
[The following letters illustrate Huxley's keenness to correct any
misrepresentation of his opinions from a weighty source, amid the way
in which, without abating his just claims, he could make the peace
gracefully.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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