Early Life and Education
Holliday was born in Griffin, Georgia, to Henry Burroughs Holliday and Alice Jane Holliday (née McKey). His father served in the Mexican–American War and the Civil War. His family baptized him at the First Presbyterian Church in 1852.
In 1864 his family moved to Valdosta, Georgia. Holliday's mother died of tuberculosis on September 16, 1866, when he was 15 years old. Three months later his father married Rachel Martin. While in Valdosta, he attended the Valdosta Institute, where he received a strong classical secondary education in rhetoric, grammar, mathematics, history, and languages – principally Latin, but also French and some Ancient Greek.
In 1870, the 19-year-old Holliday left home to begin dental school in Philadelphia. On March 1, 1872, at the age of 20, he met the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery (which later merged with the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine). He graduated 5 months before his 21st birthday, which would have been problematic since this age was needed both to hold a D.D.S. degree or to practice dentistry as anything other than a student under a preceptor, in Georgia.
After graduation, Holliday did not go home, but worked as an assistant with a classmate, A. Jameson Fuches, Jr., in St. Louis, Missouri. By the end of July he had moved to Atlanta, where he lived with his uncle and his family while beginning his career as a dentist. A few weeks before his birthday the Atlanta papers carried an announcement by noted dentist Arthur C. Ford in Atlanta that Holliday would fill his place in the office while he was attending dental meetings. This was the beginning of Holliday's career in private practice as a dentist, but it lasted only a short time, until December.
Holliday's cousin by marriage was Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone With the Wind.
Read more about this topic: Doc Holliday
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“The exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he excludes himself from enjoyment, in the attempt to appropriate it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“... all education must be unsound which does not propose for itself some object; and the highest of all objects must be that of living a life in accordance with God’s Will.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)