THE MAN 5 



fourteen he was taken by some student friends to a 

 post-mortem, the result of which was an attack of 

 blood-poisoning. To this he attributed the " hypo- 

 chondriacal dyspepsia " which afflicted him to the end 

 of his life. Although engineering was his hobby, 

 medicine, at the start, was his destiny. At sixteen, 

 on the removal of his family to Rotherhithe, he was 

 placed as assistant to a Dr. Chandler as a preliminary 

 to " walking the hospitals." Many of the patients 

 were in more need of food than physic, a condition 

 of things which set Huxley wondering " why the 

 masses did not sally forth and get a few hours' eating 

 and drinking and plunder to their heart's content 

 before the police could stop and hang a few of 

 them." l 



This early contact with the grim realities of the 

 social problem gave him authority to be heard upon 

 the economic and educational questions in which his 

 interest deepened with his years, and to indicate to the 

 people how they may alone work out their own salva- 

 tion. 



I believe in the fustian [he said], and can talk to it 

 better than to any amount of gauze and Saxony. 

 I want the working classes to understand 

 that Science and her ways are great facts for them — 

 that physical virtue is the base of all other, and that 

 they are to be clean and temperate and all the rest — 



» 1. 16. 



