In 1803, on January 26, the lectures at the Institution recommenced. Young and Davy each gave weekly two day lectures and one evening lecture. On Tuesday and Friday the lectures were in the evening.
On February 21 Young proposed his preface[24] to the second volume of the Journal of the Institution.
This year, in March, he took his first Cambridge medical degree; he did not receive his degree as Doctor of Medicine until 1808.
On July 4 the engagement of Dr. Young with the Royal Institution terminated.[25]
On October 3 he was elected a subscriber for life for his services to the Institution.
On November 6 he wrote to the managers:
40 Welbeck Street.
I beg to return you my sincere thanks for the privileges of a life subscriber to the Royal Institution, which you have conferred upon me. I consider this honour both as a flattering mark of your approbation of the unremitting attention which it was my endeavour to pay to the objects of the Institution while I was employed in its service, and as a substantial advantage in giving me access to a collection of books so valuable as that which is now forming in it. For this privilege I cannot show my gratitude better than by endeavouring to make such use of it as to render the publication of my lectures, which I am preparing, more and more worthy of the Institution in which they were delivered, and fitted to co-operate in its exertions for the advancement and dissemination of mechanical knowledge.
After this time Dr. Young took no part in the progress of the Royal Institution. A very short sketch of the remainder of his life, therefore, will be given.
When between thirty-one and forty-one years of age he used his utmost endeavours to succeed in practice in Welbeck Street. In 1804 he married, and he built a house at Worthing, where he practised in the autumn for sixteen years. In 1807 he tried to become physician to the Middlesex Hospital. In this he failed, but he lectured there on Chemistry, Physiology, Nosology, Practice of Medicine, and Materia Medica. Many of the lectures formed afterwards part of his work on ‘Medical Literature.’
This year he published his ‘Course of Lectures at the Royal Institution’ in two quarto volumes. The long delay was occasioned partly from the increase of matter and partly from the difficulty of the engravings. Through the bankruptcy of his publisher, Johnson, he lost the 1,000l. he was to receive for his work. The Dean of Ely says of these volumes: ‘They form altogether the most comprehensive system of natural philosophy and of what the French call physics that has ever been published in this country; equally remarkable for precision and accuracy in the enunciation of the vast multitude of propositions and facts which they contain, for the boldness with which they enter upon the discussion of the most abstruse and difficult subjects, and for the addition or suggestion of new matter or new views in almost every department of philosophy.’