GRESHAM COLLEGE.
This allusion to the Royal Society has brought to our notice Gresham College, the first home of the Society. Pepys often alludes to “The College,” meaning thereby the meetings of the Royal Society in Gresham College. This College, which ought to have been the nucleus of a university of London, was founded by Sir Thomas Gresham, who was born in 1519, and flourished in the reigns of Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth. He was himself a university man, having been at Caius College, Cambridge, and he amassed great wealth as a merchant and financier. He died in 1579, and by his will he left the bulk of his property to his widow, with the stipulation that at her death his house in Bishopsgate Street should be converted into a college, and that it should have for its endowment the rents arising from the shops in the Royal Exchange, which in Gresham’s time amounted to £700 a year. The Corporation and the Mercers’ Company were the trustees of this fund. There were seven endowed professorships—viz., astronomy, physic, law, geometry, divinity, rhetoric, and music. Gresham’s house in Bishopsgate Street appears to have been admirably adapted for a college. It was quadrangular, and had a garden and planted walks, so that the quiet and seclusion which are essential to study might have been obtained there. Be the cause what it may, the College, which escaped the fire, did not flourish.
GRESHAM COLLEGE.
The Royal Society left it in 1710, and in 1768 Gresham House was pulled down to make way for an Excise Office, the Government granting £500 a year in exchange for the house and land. After this date the lectures were given in a room of the Royal Exchange, and in 1843 the present Gresham College was built at the corner of Basinghall Street, the house being outwardly not to be distinguished from the mercantile houses which abound in the city. The cause of the failure of Gresham College is doubtful. Dr. Johnson was of opinion that it was due to the fact that the students paid no fees, and therefore a powerful stimulus to the professors was wanting. The condition that the lectures were to be given in Latin as well as English, a condition reasonable enough in Gresham’s time, has served as a clog; but probably the chief cause is to be found in the physical and moral atmosphere of the city. The corner of Basinghall Street is a very different place from those “groves of the Academy where Plato taught the truth.” Here every creature you meet appears to be in a hurry—certainly in too great a hurry to get wisdom, which, says the son of Sirach, “cometh by opportunities of leisure.”
If universities, in the proper sense, have languished in London, the same cannot be said of learned societies. London, the great exchange and mart of the world, has assisted by its numerous and flourishing societies in the exchange of knowledge and ideas among learned men. The Medical Society of London was founded in 1773 in Bolt Court, Fleet Street. The Royal Medico-Chirurgical Society was founded in 1805. The other medical societies are all recent creations.
Thus it appears that the College of Physicians and the Company of Barbers and Surgeons, and also Gresham College, were the earliest schools of medicine in London, the only places where anything approaching to systematic instruction was given.