Early Life and Education
Howe was born on Pearl Street in Boston, Massachusetts on November 10, 1801. His father, Joseph Neals Howe, was a ship-owner and cordage manufacturer. His mother, Patty Gridley, was considered to be one of the most beautiful women of her day.
Howe was educated at Boston Latin School, where he was cruelly treated, and even beaten, according to his daughter. Laura (Howe) Richards later wrote: “So far as I can remember, my father had no pleasant memories of his school days."
Boston in the early nineteenth century was a hotbed of political foment. Howe’s father was a Democrat who considered Harvard University a den of Federalists, and refused to allow his sons to enter the university. Accordingly, in 1818, Howe's father had him enrolled at Brown University. Most of his time there was spent engaged in practical jokes and other hi-jinx and, years later, Howe told his children that he regretted that he hadn’t more seriously applied himself to his studies. One of his classmates, a future president of Brown University, Dr. Caswell, described Howe in this way, “He showed mental capabilities which would naturally fit him for fine scholarship. His mind was quick, versatile, and inventive. I do not think he was deficient in logical power, but the severer studies did not seem to be congenial to him.” After graduating from Brown in 1821, Howe attended Harvard Medical School, taking his degree in 1824.
Read more about this topic: Samuel Gridley Howe
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We have had many harbingers and forerunners; but of a purely spiritual life, history has afforded no example. I mean we have yet no man who has leaned entirely on his character, and eaten angels’ food; who, trusting to his sentiments, found life made of miracles; who, working for universal aims, found himself fed, he knew not how; clothed, sheltered, and weaponed, he knew not how, and yet it was done by his own hands.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Do we honestly believe that hopeless kids growing up under the harsh new rules will turn out to be chaste, studious, responsible adults? On the contrary, by limiting welfare, job training, education and nutritious food, won’t we plant the seeds for another bumper crop of out-of-wedlock moms, deadbeat dads and worse?”
—Richard B. Stolley (20th century)