Early Life
On September 4, 1802 Marcus Whitman was born in Federal Hollow, New York to Alice and Beza Whitman. The family's immigrant paternal ancestor was John Whitman, who immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony before 1639 from England. After his father Beza's death when Whitman was seven years old, he was sent to Massachusetts to live with his uncle.
He dreamed of becoming a minister but did not have the money for such schooling. As a young man, he had returned to New York. He studied medicine for two years with an experienced physician under the form of apprenticeship approved then, and received his degree from Fairfield Medical College in New York. He practiced for a few years in Canada but was interested in going to the West.
Read more about this topic: Marcus Whitman
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one’s own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.”
—Sherwin B. Nuland (b. 1930)