Page "Thomas Henry Huxley" Paragraph 10

He was apprenticed for short periods to several medical practitioners: at 13 to his brother-in-law John Cooke in Coventry, who passed him on to Thomas Chandler, notable for his experiments using mesmerism for medical purposes.

Chandler's practice was in London's Rotherhithe amidst the squalor endured by the Dickensian poor.

Here Thomas would have seen poverty, crime and rampant disease at its worst.

Next, another brother-in-law took him on: John Salt, his eldest sister's husband.

Now 16, Huxley entered Sydenham College ( behind University College Hospital ), a cut-price anatomy school whose founder Marshall Hall discovered the reflex arc.

All this time Huxley continued his program of reading, which more than made up for his lack of formal schooling.