He resigned his professorship in 1803, fearing that its duties would interfere with his medical practice. In 1802, he was appointed foreign secretary of the Royal Society, of which he had been elected a fellow in 1794. In 1801, Young was appointed professor of natural philosophy (mainly physics) at the Royal Institution. Young published many of his first academic articles anonymously to protect his reputation as a physician. In the same year he inherited the estate of his grand-uncle, Richard Brocklesby, which made him financially independent, and in 1799 he established himself as a physician at 48 Welbeck Street, London (now recorded with a blue plaque). In 1797 he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Young began to study medicine in London at St Bartholomew's Hospital in 1792, moved to the University of Edinburgh Medical School in 1794, and a year later went to Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany, where he obtained the degree of doctor of medicine in 1796 from the University of Göttingen. By the age of fourteen, Young had learned Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Syriac, Samaritan Hebrew, Arabic, Biblical Aramaic, Persian, Turkish, and Ge'ez. Young belonged to a Quaker family of Milverton, Somerset, where he was born in 1773, the eldest of ten children. Young's work was subsequently supported by the work of Augustin-Jean Fresnel. Young is credited with establishing Christiaan Huygens' wave theory of light, in contrast to the corpuscular theory of Isaac Newton. ![]() ![]() His work influenced that of William Herschel, Hermann von Helmholtz, James Clerk Maxwell, and Albert Einstein. ![]() Young has been described as " The Last Man Who Knew Everything". He was instrumental in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, specifically the Rosetta Stone. Thomas Young FRS (13 June 1773 – ) was a British polymath who made notable contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, language, musical harmony, and Egyptology. William Herschel, James Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein, Augustin-Jean Fresnel, Jean-François Champollion
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