William Kitchen Parker - Medical Training

Medical Training

Parker studied at King's College London from 1844–46, and became a student-demonstrator there to Mr (later Sir) William Bowman, the surgeon, histologist and anatomist. He attended Charing Cross Hospital in 1846–47. He never took notes during lectures, but drew sketches, and claimed he remembered the facts as well as anyone who took notes. He produced sheet after sheet of artistic drawing, all worthy of publication and large numbers of skeletons of birds and mammals. He attended Richard Owen's lectures at the College of Surgeons, and "received with enthusiasm the doctrine of the archetype which he was afterwards to do so much to overturn".

Parker avoided taking exams, and remained for many years with the minimum qualification for running a general medical practice, which in those days was an LSA (Licenciate of the Society of Apothecaries), a qualification of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries. From 1849, Parker ran a general practice in London for many years, at various locations. The income supported his family, but his interest was in zoology, at which he was entirely self-taught. Today he is remembered only as a zoologist, one of a quite a sizeable group who were qualified in medicine but whose life work was in natural history or one of the newly named biological sciences. T.H. Huxley, Richard Owen and J.D. Hooker and were perhaps the greatest of these men.