Memorials of John A. Torrance, agent for thirty years of the Patients' and Prisoners' Aid Society, with portrait / Edited, with biographical sketch, by Jas. Chisholm.

  • Torrance, John Ainslee, 1832-1908?
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Memorials of John A. Torrance, agent for thirty years of the Patients' and Prisoners' Aid Society, with portrait / Edited, with biographical sketch, by Jas. Chisholm. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    young family. She was strongly urged to seek a home for some of them in one or other of the institutions that have been founded in the Scottish capital for the succour of fatherless children. But she refused to part with one of them. We read of Barnardo's mother that she was a woman of great strength of character and deep religious convictions, and that explains his biography. It was the same with Torrance and his mother. With a dutiful regard to his physical and moral well-being, he was reared on oatmeal, the Shorter Catechism, and the east wind. The last element blows with a snell insistence from the German Ocean, and, along with the other two less exacting elements, has put stamina into many a Scottish boy. He saw the ships at Leith come sailing in from over the horizon, and his boyish imagination yearned to see what lay beyond. Unknown to his mother, whose anxiety and toil he foolishly thought to lighten by his absence, he hired himself as a cabin-boy. It was a rude awakening. The captain was exacting and cruel. Very clearly the way to the House that Jack built did not he in that direction. And so when the vessel returned, after visiting some of the ports of Northern Europe, he stole away from his dungeon and its haunting ogre and nestled again at home, under the brooding love of his dear mother. He began hard work on shore when he was about ten years of age, and kept at it all through the sixty-six years that have passed since then. Like Livingstone, who started work at the same age, he laid his first earnings in his mother's lap ; and so truly was the child the father of the man that after he