AleÅ¡ Hrdlička (March 29, 1869 - September 5, 1943) :: Essays Papers

AleÃ… ¡ HrdliÄ ka (March 29, 1869 - September 5, 1943) AleÃ… ¡ Ferdinand HrdliÄ ka was born to Maximilian and Karolina (Wajnerovà ¡ or Wagner) HrdliÄ ka on March 29, 1869, in Humpolec, Bohemia, which is now Czechoslovakia (Gillispie, 527). His father was a respected master cabinetmaker who owned his own shop. The oldest of seven children, HrdliÄ ka attended local schools and received private tutoring in Latin and Greek from Ludolfa PejÄ och, a Jesuit priest who was attracted by the boy’s abilities (James, 371). He left high school in 1882 at the tender age of fourteen, to emigrate with his father to New York City, where the other members of his family later joined them (James, 371). Once in America, HrdliÄ ka went to work with his father as a laborer in a cigar factory to help contribute to the family income. He attended the evening courses to learn English and to gain himself a high school equivalency diploma (Gillispie, 527). A serious attack of typhoid fever at the age of 19 altered the course of HrdliÄ ka’s life drastically. It is said that his attending physician, a trustee of the Eclectic Medical College in New York, became interested in HrdliÄ ka and persuaded him to undertake the study of medicine at the college. Graduating at the head of his class in 1892, he started a practice in New York’s Lower East Side. At the same time, to broaden his medical background, he began attending the New York Homeopathic Medical College, from which he graduated, again at the head of the class, in 1894 (James, 371). Shortly thereafter, he passed the Maryland State Medical Board (allopathic) examination, hoping to be able to join the staff of the John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, but he gave up this plan to accept an offer of a research internship in the new State Homeopathic Hospital for the Insane at Middletown, New York. It was while he was in this position that he became interested in the application of anthropometry to medicine. Through his autopsies and examinations of the patients, he became interested in whether physical characteristics and skeletal measurements might show systematic differences according to sex and type of insanity (James, 371). It was this interest which led to an invitation in 1896 to join a multidisciplinary research team being assembled by the histologist Ira Van Gieson (1866-1913) to staff the newly created Pathological Institute in New York City (Spencer, 503).