James McHenry - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

McHenry was born into a Scots-Irish family in Balymena, County Antrim, Ireland in 1753. He attended a school in Dublin for a classical education. Alarmed that he became sick from excessive studying, his family in 1771 sent him at age 17 to North America to recuperate. He lived with a family friend in Philadelphia and had an older brother in the colonies. In Philadelphia, McHenry studied under Benjamin Rush and became a physician.

Read more about this topic:  James McHenry

Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:

    “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 ...”
    —Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)

    “In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
    —Emma Goldman (1869–1940)

    “... it is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.”
    —George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

    “How to attain sufficient clarity of thought to meet the terrifying issues now facing us, before it is too late, is ... important. Of one thing I feel reasonably sure: we can’t stop to discuss whether the table has or hasn’t legs when the house is burning down over our heads. Nor do the classics per se seem to furnish the kind of education which fits people to cope with a fast-changing civilization.”
    —Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)