Early Life
He was born in Edinburgh, the second son of Thomas Anderson who worked in the National Bank of Scotland and his wife Jane Cleghorn. John took an interest in natural history at an early age as did his brother, who worked at the Royal Botanic Garden in Calcutta from 1861 to 1863. He went to school at George Square Academy and Hill Street Institution before joining work at the Bank of Scotland. He left to study medicine and graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1861. He studied anatomy under John Goodsir and became an MD in 1862 with a gold medal for his thesis in zoology. He was also associated with the founding of the Royal Physical Society which grew out of the Wernerian Society over which he presided. He was appointed to the chair of natural history in the Free Church college in Edinburgh and worked for the next two years. During this period he studied marine organisms based on dredging off the coast of Scotland and published notes in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History.
Read more about this topic: John Anderson (zoologist)
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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