The Royal Institution: Its Founder and First ProfessorsJones, Bence
History
The Royal Institution: Its Founder and First Professors
Jones, Bence
Davy, Humphry, Sir, 1778-1829; Royal Institution of Great Britain; Rumford, Benjamin, Graf von, 1753-1814; Young, Thomas, 1773-1829
On February 21 Young proposed his preface[24] to the second volume of
the Journal of the Institution.
This year, in March, he took his first Cambridge medical degree; he did
not receive his degree as Doctor of Medicine until 1808.
On July 4 the engagement of Dr. Young with the Royal Institution
terminated.[25]
On October 3 he was elected a subscriber for life for his services to
the Institution.
On November 6 he wrote to the managers:
40 Welbeck Street.
I beg to return you my sincere thanks for the privileges of a life
subscriber to the Royal Institution, which you have conferred
upon me. I consider this honour both as a flattering mark of your
approbation of the unremitting attention which it was my endeavour
to pay to the objects of the Institution while I was employed in
its service, and as a substantial advantage in giving me access to
a collection of books so valuable as that which is now forming in
it. For this privilege I cannot show my gratitude better than by
endeavouring to make such use of it as to render the publication
of my lectures, which I am preparing, more and more worthy of
the Institution in which they were delivered, and fitted to
co-operate in its exertions for the advancement and dissemination
of mechanical knowledge.
After this time Dr. Young took no part in the progress of the Royal
Institution. A very short sketch of the remainder of his life,
therefore, will be given.
When between thirty-one and forty-one years of age he used his utmost
endeavours to succeed in practice in Welbeck Street. In 1804 he
married, and he built a house at Worthing, where he practised in the
autumn for sixteen years. In 1807 he tried to become physician to
the Middlesex Hospital. In this he failed, but he lectured there on
Chemistry, Physiology, Nosology, Practice of Medicine, and Materia
Medica. Many of the lectures formed afterwards part of his work on
‘Medical Literature.’
This year he published his ‘Course of Lectures at the Royal Institution’
in two quarto volumes. The long delay was occasioned partly from the
increase of matter and partly from the difficulty of the engravings.
Through the bankruptcy of his publisher, Johnson, he lost the
1,000_l._ he was to receive for his work. The Dean of Ely says of
these volumes: ‘They form altogether the most comprehensive system of
natural philosophy and of what the French call physics that has ever
been published in this country; equally remarkable for precision and
accuracy in the enunciation of the vast multitude of propositions and
facts which they contain, for the boldness with which they enter upon
the discussion of the most abstruse and difficult subjects, and for
the addition or suggestion of new matter or new views in almost every
department of philosophy.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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