Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And WorkMitchell, P. Chalmers (Peter Chalmers), Sir
Science
Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work
Mitchell, P. Chalmers (Peter Chalmers), Sir
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1825-1895
After a short period of apprenticeship, or sometimes during the
course of it, the young medical students "walked" a hospital. This
consisted in attending the demonstrations of the physicians and
surgeons in the wards of the hospital and in pursuing anatomical,
chemical, and physiological study in the medical school attached to
the hospital. A large fee was charged for the complete course, but at
many of the hospitals there were entrance scholarships which relieved
those who gained them of all cost. In 1842 Huxley and his elder
brother, James, applied for such free scholarships at Charing Cross
Hospital. There is no record in the books of the hospital as to what
persons supported the application. The entry in the minutes for
September 6, 1842, states that
"Applications from the following gentlemen (including the two
sons of Mr. George Huxley, late senior assistant master in Ealing
School), were laid before the meeting, and their testimonials
being approved of, it was decided that those gentlemen should be
admitted as free scholars, if their classical attainments should
be found upon examination to be satisfactory."
It appears that the two Huxleys were able to satisfy the probably
unexacting demands of the classical examiners, for they began their
hospital work in October of the same year.
Those who know the magnificent laboratories and lecture-rooms which
have grown up in connection with the larger London hospitals must have
difficulty in realising the humble arrangements for teaching students
in the early forties. What endowments there were--and Charing Cross
was never a richly endowed hospital--were devoted entirely to the
hospital as opposed to the teaching school. There were no separate
buildings for anatomy, physiology, and so forth. At Charing Cross the
dissecting-room was in a cellar under the hospital, and subjects like
chemistry, botany, physiology, and so forth were crowded into
inconvenient side rooms. The teachers were not specialists, devoting
their whole attention to particular branches of science, but were
doctors engaged in practice, who, in addition to their private duties
and their work at the hospital, each undertook to lecture upon a
special scientific subject. Huxley came specially under the influence
of Mr. Wharton Jones, who had begun to teach physiology at the
hospital a year before. Mr. Jones throughout his life was engaged in
professional work, his specialty being ophthalmic surgery, but he was
a devoted student of anatomy and physiology, and made several
classical contributions to scientific knowledge, his best-known
discoveries relating to blood corpuscles and to the nature of the
mammalian egg-cell. But perhaps his greatest claim to fame is that it
was he who first imbued Huxley with a love for anatomical science and
with a knowledge of the methods of investigation. At the end of his
first session, in 1843, Huxley received the first prize in the senior
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