Page:Czecho-Slovak Student Life, Volume 18.djvu/28
Czechoslovak Men of Note.
In this issue: Dr. Aleš Hrdlička, Mr. Michael Bosak, Mr. Václav J. Čálek, Dr. Georgianna Dvořák-Theobald.
“This is the latest distinction that Dr. Hrdlicka has received. He is now on his way to Europe, where on November 8th he will be presented with the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Society for the great service to anthropological science, not merely in America, but throughout the scientific world. Only once before has this Medal been presented to an American, and that was in 1908 when Prof. Wm. Z. Ripley of Harvard received it”, wrote Dr. Frank Thone of the Smithsonian Institute to the editor of the Student Life on October 10, 1927.
There is no doubt that Dr. Aleš Hrdlička, at present curator of Anthropology at the U. S. National Museum, is one of the brightest stars in the constellation of American scientists.
He is of Czechoslovak ancestry, having been born in Humpolec, Bohemia on March 29, 1869. After receiving his academic education in Bohemia at the Maximilian and Karolina Schools, he came to New York, where he began to study medicine. As a youth of twenty-three, this transplanted young man graduated in New York City from the Eclectic College of Medicine. Two years later he graduated from the Homeopathic College of Medicine, and a few months afterward passed the examinations of the Maryland Allopathic Medical Board. Certainly Dr. Hrdlička played no favorites, for he studied all sides of the question. Altho trained in medicine, he soon shifted his interest to anthropology. When twenty-seven years old, he began to teach the nature of man—or anthropology—in a New York medical school. Soon he was studying this science more deeply in Paris at the Paris University and Anthropological School.
Then for five years, 1894–1899, the American Museum of Natural History of New York City gave him charge of the exhibits that