On his return to Virginia, Draper was engaged as chemist and mineralogist to the newly formed Mineralogical Society of Virginia, which had been inspired by the writings of the celebrated pioneer of scientific agriculture in America, the Virginian Edmund Ruffin. His other principal instructor was Robert Hare. Mitchell in the researches of Dutrochet on osmosis. His thesis, “Glandular Action,” reflected the interest of his teacher J. The earnings of his sister Dorothy Catharine as a schoolteacher enabled him to take his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1836.
He had already collaborated on three minor scientific publications before leaving England and now published eight additional papers between 18 from what he ambitiously described as his “laboratory” in the family farmhouse. On the urging of maternal relatives, who had gone to America before the Revolution to found a Wesleyan community, Draper immigrated with his mother, his three sisters, and his new wife to Virginia in 1832. At a time when Parliament had not yet broken the monopoly of Oxford and Cambridge for granting degrees, Draper had to be contented with a “certificate of honours” in chemistry. Turner interested Draper in the chemical effects of light and thereby gave his career a decisive turn. There Draper studied chemistry under Edward Turner, an admirer of Berzelius and the author of one of the earliest English textbooks in organic chemistry. The father had purchased two shares in the new London University intended to accommodate scientists, workingmen, and Dissenters, but he died before his son commenced his premedical studies at University College (as it later became) in 1829. Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, 4 January 1882)ĭraper was the son of an itinerant Methodist preacher who possessed a Gregorian telescope and who evidently encouraged the boy’s scientific interests.
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