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 shop in Whitechapel. The degradation of Whitechapel life, especially in regard to the relations of the sexes, made an indelible impression on his mind. Afterwards he obtained a clerkship in an insurance office. He devoted his nights to hard study, teaching himself in some sort German, Italian, and Russian, and dabbling in metaphysics, mathematics, and history. At nineteen he fell in love with Miss Margaret Haddon, proposed, and was rejected. After an illness caused by work and anxiety, he became a medical student at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and made a voyage to China as the surgeon of a passenger ship. On his return he took medals, his diploma (1847), and an assistant-surgeoncy at Newport, Essex. Meanwhile, at the cost of prolonged mental suffering, he had lost his belief in Christianity; Miss Haddon rejected a second proposal from him on this account, and he became medical officer on board a ship chartered by government to carry free negroes from Sierra Leone to Jamaica.

He reached Sierra Leone on 15 Oct. 1847, and on 5 Nov. set sail for Jamaica. There he remained about two years, busily occupied in finding places for the negroes on the plantations, and studying the social life of the island. After paying a visit to some relations in New Orleans, he returned home in the spring of 1850. On the homeward voyage he was oppressed by a sense of sin, read the Bible, Nelson on ‘The Cause and Cure of Infidelity,’ and some other apologetic books, and was almost persuaded to be a Christian. Miss Haddon now consented to an engagement, and Hinton began practice in London at Bartholomew Close, in partnership with his friend Mr. Fisher, devoting special attention to aural surgery. Through homœopathy he was led to the serious study of physiology, and of the delicate problems which concern the relations of mind and body, and in particular of volition and cerebral action. He was now much influenced by Coleridge, whose ‘Aids to Reflection’ was one of his favourite books. He thus recovered, and for a time retained a certain belief in Christianity.

In 1852 he married. In 1853 he dissolved partnership, but continued for the next few years to practise as a surgeon in London, and to study aural surgery. His investigations led him to devote some attention to the theory of sound, on which he gave a course of lectures in 1854–5. About this time he made the acquaintance of Dr. (afterwards Sir William) Gull [q. v.], who continued his close friend throughout life. Still busy with philosophy, he thought he had discovered a new method of transcending phenomena, which determined all his subsequent speculation, viz. the use of the moral reason to interpret the results reached by science. A complete theory of the universe must (he argued) satisfy the emotions, and particularly the religious emotions, no less than the understanding.

Hinton began his literary career in 1856 with the publication, in the ‘Christian Spectator,’ of some papers on physiology and ethics. In October 1858 he contributed to the ‘Medico-Chirurgical Review’ an article on ‘Physical Morphology, or the Law of Organic Forms,’ in which he maintained that organic form is the result of motion in the direction of least resistance, a conclusion accepted provisionally by Mr. Herbert Spencer (First Principles, 3rd ed. § 78) ‘as a large instalment of the truth.’ In 1859 he published a little book on the relations of religion and science, entitled ‘Man and his Dwelling-place,’ which was favourably received. A series of papers on various topics in biology and physiology followed in the ‘Cornhill Magazine.’ They were afterwards reprinted as ‘Life in Nature’ (1862) and ‘Thoughts on Health’ (1871). He wrote the treatise on diseases of the ear for Holmes's ‘System of Surgery’ (1862), and was one of the editors of the ‘Year-Book of Medicine’ (New Sydenham Soc.) in 1863. In 1866 he published a little essay entitled ‘The Mystery of Pain,’ which is probably the best known of his writings. He then joined the newly established Metaphysical Society. In the autumn of 1870 he visited the island of São Miguel in the Azores, where he had bought a small estate. On his way thither his mind was much occupied with the consideration of asceticism. This led in the course of a few months to a change in his ethical views so thorough that he was accustomed to describe it as a ‘moral revolution.’ The change consisted in the substitution of ‘altruism’ for individualism as the basis of morals. To work out this idea he determined to retire from practice, and, to be the better able to do so, he threw himself on his return to England with redoubled energy into his professional duties. At the same time he prepared for the press several scientific works. In 1874, besides editing a manual of physiology entitled ‘Physiology for Practical Use, by Various Writers,’ he published ‘The Place of the Physician, being the Introductory Lecture at Guy's Hospital, October 1873,’ with ‘Essays on the Law of Human Life and on the Relations between the Organic and Inorganic Worlds;’ also an ‘Atlas of the Membrana Tympani, with Descriptive Text, being Illustrations of the Diseases of the Ear;’ ‘The Questions of