The study in which she took the keenest interest was history,—"the human tale of this wide world,"—but even at the time of her greatest enthusiasm she realized that while knowledge comes from the records of the past, wisdom comes from a right understanding of the actual life of the present.
After receiving from her Alma Mater the degree of B. A., she entered the Woman's Medical College in Philadelphia to prepare for real work in a real world, but the old spinal trouble soon brought that chapter to a close. After some months in Doctor Weir Mitchell's hospital, and a longer time of invalidism, she agreed to follow her doctor's pleasant prescription of two years in Europe.
"When I returned I decided to give up my medical course," said Jane Addams, "partly because I had no real aptitude for scientific work, and partly because I discovered that there were other genuine reasons for living among the poor than that of practicing medicine upon them."
While in London Miss Addams saw much of the life of the great city from the top of an omnibus. Once she was taken with a number of tourists to see the spectacle of the Saturday night auction of fruits and vegetables to the poor of the East Side, and the lurid picture blotted out all the picturesque impressions, full of pleasant human interest and historic association, that she had been eagerly enjoying during this first visit to London town. Always afterwards, when she closed her eyes, she could see the scene; it seemed as if it would never leave her. In the flare of the gas-light, which made weird and spectral the motley, jostling crowd and touched the black shadows it created into a grotesque semblance of life, she saw wrinkled women, desperate-looking men, and pale children vying with each other to secure with their farthings and ha'pennies the vegetables held up by a hoarse, red-faced auctioneer.
One haggard youth sat on the curb, hungrily devouring the cabbage that he had succeeded in bidding in. Her sensation-loving companions on the bus stared with mingled pity and disgust; but the girl who saw what she looked on with the inward eye of the heart turned away her face. The poverty that she had before seen had not prepared her for wretchedness like this.
"For the following weeks," she said, "I went about London furtively, afraid to look down narrow streets and alleys lest they disclose this hideous human need and suffering. In time, nothing of the great city seemed real save the misery of its East End."
Polk Street façade of Hull-House buildings
A corner of the Boys' Library at Hull-House