John Aikin (1747–1822) was an English medical doctor, surgeon, and educator. He later committed himself wholly to biography and writing in periodicals.
Born at Kibworth Harcourt, Leicestershire, Aikin studied medicine at Edinburgh and London under Dr. William Hunter. He initially practiced as a surgeon at Chester and Warrington, got an MD (1780) from Leiden, Holland, and served as a doctor in Great Yarmouth and London.
Aikin concerned himself more with the advocacy of liberty of conscience than with his professional duties, and he devoted himself wholly to biography and writing in periodicals. He was editor of Richard Phillips’s The Monthly Magazine (1796–1807) and Annual Register (1811–15.) Aikin and his sister Anna Laetitia Barbauld produced Evenings at Home (6 vols., 1792–95) for elementary family reading; they were translated into almost every European language.
Aikin’s works include General Biography (10 vols., 1799–1815,) Biographical Memoirs of Medicine in Great Britain (1780,) The Arts of Life (1802,) and The Lives of John Selden (1812.)
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The sunshine of life is made up of very little beams that are bright all the time. To give up something, when giving up will prevent unhappiness; to yield, when persisting will chafe and fret others; to go a little around rather than come against another; to take an ill look or a cross word quietly, rather than resent or return it,—these are the ways in which clouds and storms are kept off, and a pleasant and steady sunshine secured.
—John Aikin
Topics: Happiness
Nothing is such an obstacle to the production of excellence as the power of producing what is good with ease and rapidity.
—John Aikin
Topics: Excellence
The hardest trial of the heart is, whether it can bear a rival’s failure without triumph.
—John Aikin
Topics: Trials, Heart
To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor’s prohibited list.
—John Aikin
Topics: Books
He whose first emotion, on the view of an excellent work, is to undervalue or depreciate it, will never have one of his own to show.
—John Aikin
Topics: Critics
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