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.
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