At fifteen and a-half he began his medical training. Engineering, it
seems, was not within his parents' purview; the boy was thoughtful
and scientific; medicine was then the only avenue for science, and
medicine loomed large on their horizon, for two of their daughters
had married doctors. Of these, Dr. Cooke had already begun to give him
instruction in anatomy; it looked as though destiny had marked out his
career.
In those days, the future doctor began by being apprenticed to a
regular practitioner; he picked up a great deal from compounding
medicines, watching out-patients in the surgery, and attending simple
cases, especially if he had a capable man to work under. At the same
time he prepared for his future examinations, and got ready to walk
the hospitals.
This apprenticeship was a strongly formative period in Huxley's life.
He was bound to Dr. Chandler, of Rotherhithe, and joined him in this
quarter of poverty and struggle on January 7, 1841. The little journal
shows him busy with all the subjects of the London Matriculation:
History ancient and modern, Greek, Latin, English Grammar, Chemistry,
Mathematics, Physics, with German also and Physiology, besides
experimental work in natural science, philosophical analysis, and a
copious course of Carlyle.
But this book-work was the least of the influences acting upon
him. Dr. Chandler had charge of the parish doctoring, and the boy's
experiences among the poor in the dock region of the East End left an
ineffaceable mark. It was a grim, living commentary on his Carlyle.
For the rest of his life the cause of the poor appealed vividly to
him, because he had at least seen something of the way in which the
poor lived. People who were suffering from nothing but slow starvation
would come to him for medical aid. One scene above all was burnt into
his memory: a sick girl in a wretched garret, the boy visitor saying
as gently as he could that her sole need was better food, and the
sister of the starved child who turned upon him with a kind of choking
passion, and, pulling from her pocket a few pence and half-pence and
holding them out, cried: "That is all I get for six-and-thirty hours'
work, and you talk about giving her proper food."
When, after a full year, he left Rotherhithe for the north of London,
to be apprenticed--as his elder brother, James, had already been
apprenticed--to his other medical brother-in-law, Dr. Scott, he saw
more of this teeming, squalid life in the filthy courts and alleys
through which he used to pass on his way to the library of the College
of Surgeons.
What, in later life, he tried to do to better this state of things
was not the usual philanthropic work, but the endeavour to
bring intellectual light to the ignorant toilers, to strip away
make-believe, and provide some machinery by which to catch and utilize
capacity.
Great was the change from the surroundings of Rotherhithe to the home
atmosphere of the Scotts. He was now with his favourite sister Eliza,
his senior by twelve years, who was a second mother to him. Her
sympathy and encouragement did much for him; her belief in the future
of "her boy" was redoubled upon his first public success when, at the
age of seventeen, he won the second prize, the silver medal of the
Apothecaries' Company, in a competitive examination in botany. "For a
young hand," he tells us, "I worked really hard from eight or nine in
the morning until twelve at night, besides a long, hot summer's walk
over to Chelsea, two or three times a week, to hear Lindley. A great
part of the time--_i.e._, June and July--I worked till sunrise. The
result was a sort of ophthalmia, which kept me from reading at night
for months afterwards."
The lively and amusing description of the examination and its sequel
is given in full in the _Life_; suffice it to say that when four
o'clock came and only two competitors were left writing hard, and not
half through the paper, they were allowed to go on by general consent.
By eight o'clock the seventeen-year-old came to an end; the older man
went on until nine. This was John Ellerton Stocks, afterwards M.D. and
a distinguished traveller and botanist in India. To him fell the first
prize; the boy, to his own astonishment and the wild delight of his
sister, won the second.
In October, 1812, a couple of months after this success, both he and
his brother James entered Charing Cross Hospital as free scholars.
Here he worked very hard--when it pleased him--took up all sorts of
pursuits and dropped them again, and read everything he could lay
hands upon, including novels. The one instructor by whom he was really
impressed, and for whom he did his utmost, was Wharton Jones, lecturer
on physiology. "He was extremely kind and helpful to the youngster,
who, I am afraid, took up more of his time than he had any right to
do." Wharton Jones assuredly was one of those born teachers who love
to give time and all to a keen and promising pupil. It is good to
know that the bread he cast upon the waters returned to him after many
days. Wharton Jones, too, was responsible for the publication of the
young man's first scientific paper, in the _Medical Gazette_ of 1845.
Investigating things for himself, the student of nineteen had found
a hitherto undiscovered membrane in the root of the human hair, which
received the name of Huxley's layer.
No doubt his work was, as he confesses, not systematically spread over
his various subjects; and his energy was fitful, though it was energy
that struck his contemporaries, who gave the name of the "Sign of
the Head and Microscope" to the familiar silhouette of him as he sat
before a window poring over his dissections, while they swarmed out
into the quadrangle after lectures.
He achieved brilliant successes as a student. In 1843 he won the first
prize in Chemistry, with a note that his "extraordinary diligence
and success in the pursuit of this branch of science do him infinite
honour," as well as the first prize in Anatomy and Physiology. He
was only twenty when, in 1845, he went up for his M.B. at London
University, and won a gold medal in his favourite subjects of Anatomy
and Physiology, being second in that section.
Early in 1846, being still too young to qualify at the College of
Surgeons, yet confronted by the imperative necessity for earning his
own bread, he applied, at the suggestion of his fellow-student,
Lyon Playfair, for service as a naval surgeon, passed the necessary
examination, and went to Haslar. His official chief, old John
Richardson, of Arctic fame, silently kept an eye upon him, and,
failing to get him one of the coveted resident appointments, kept him,
all unaware and ill-content, at Haslar till something worthy of his
scientific abilities should turn up. Seven months passed; then
came the chance of sailing on the surveying and exploring ship
_Rattlesnake_, under Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., brother of the more
famous Dean, who was in want of an assistant-surgeon with a turn for
science.