Early Life and Education
Holliday was born in Griffin, Georgia, to Henry Burroughs Holliday and Alice Jane Holliday (née McKey). His father served in the Mexican–American War and the Civil War. His family baptized him at the First Presbyterian Church in 1852.
In 1864 his family moved to Valdosta, Georgia. Holliday's mother died of tuberculosis on September 16, 1866, when he was 15 years old. Three months later his father married Rachel Martin. While in Valdosta, he attended the Valdosta Institute, where he received a strong classical secondary education in rhetoric, grammar, mathematics, history, and languages – principally Latin, but also French and some Ancient Greek.
In 1870, the 19-year-old Holliday left home to begin dental school in Philadelphia. On March 1, 1872, at the age of 20, he met the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery (which later merged with the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine). He graduated 5 months before his 21st birthday, which would have been problematic since this age was needed both to hold a D.D.S. degree or to practice dentistry as anything other than a student under a preceptor, in Georgia.
After graduation, Holliday did not go home, but worked as an assistant with a classmate, A. Jameson Fuches, Jr., in St. Louis, Missouri. By the end of July he had moved to Atlanta, where he lived with his uncle and his family while beginning his career as a dentist. A few weeks before his birthday the Atlanta papers carried an announcement by noted dentist Arthur C. Ford in Atlanta that Holliday would fill his place in the office while he was attending dental meetings. This was the beginning of Holliday's career in private practice as a dentist, but it lasted only a short time, until December.
Holliday's cousin by marriage was Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone With the Wind.
Read more about this topic: Doc Holliday
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“If you are willing to inconvenience yourself in the name of discipline, the battle is half over. Leave Grandmas early if the children are acting impossible. Depart the ballpark in the sixth inning if youve warned the kids and their behavior is still poor. If we do something like this once, our kids will remember it for a long time.”
—Fred G. Gosman (20th century)
“The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday. Things must not be done in him which are venial in the week-day classes. He is paid for this business of leading a stricter life than other people. It is his raison dêtre.... This is why the clergyman is so often called a vicarMhe being the person whose vicarious goodness is to stand for that of those entrusted to his charge.”
—Samuel Butler (18351902)
“Well encounter opposition, wont we, if we give women the same education that we give to men, Socrates says to Galucon. For then wed have to let women ... exercise in the company of men. And we know how ridiculous that would seem. ... Convention and habit are womens enemies here, and reason their ally.”
—Martha Nussbaum (b. 1947)