Life
He was born at Reading, Berkshire, the son of John Howard Hinton (1791–1873), Baptist minister and author of the History and Topography of the United States and other works. James was educated at his grandfather's school near Oxford, and at the Nonconformist school at Harpenden, and in 1838, on his father's removal to London, was apprenticed to a woollen-draper in Whitechapel. After working there for about a year he became clerk in an insurance office. His evenings were spent in intense study, and this, combined with a concentration on moral problems, so affected his health that, aged eighteen, he tried to seek refuge from his own thoughts by running away to sea. His intention having been discovered, he was sent, on the advice of his doctor, to St Bartholomew's Hospital to study for the medical profession. After receiving his diploma in 1847, he was for some time assistant surgeon at Newport, Essex, but the same year he went out to Sierra Leone to take medical charge of the free labourers on their voyage thence to Jamaica, where he stayed some time. He returned to England in 1850, and entered into partnership with a surgeon in London, where he soon had his interest awakened specially in aural surgery, and also studied physiology.
After being appointed aural surgeon to Guy's Hospital in 1863, he soon acquired a reputation as the most skillful aural surgeon of his day. In the 1870s his health began to break down, and in 1874 he gave up practice. He died the following year at the Azores of "acute inflammation of the brain".
Read more about this topic: James Hinton
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“So soon did we, wayfarers, begin to learn that man’s life is rounded with the same few facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel to find it new.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man’s skin,—seven or eight ancestors at least, and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope and affection of human nature, by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife’s thrift, and that woman’s life has no other aim.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)