A young Joseph Lister attended Benjamin Abbott's Isaac Brown Academy, a private, Quaker school in Hitchin in Hertfordshire. When Lister was older he attended Grove House School in Tottenham, also a private Quaker School, studying mathematics, natural science, and languages. His father was insistent that Lister received a good grounding in French and German, in the knowledge he would learn Latin. From an early age, Lister was encouraged by his father. He became interested in natural history that led to dissections of small animals, fish and osteology, that were examined using his fathers microscope and then be drawn using the Camera lucida technique, that his father had taught him or sketched. His fathers interests in microscopical research, developed in Lister, the determination to become a surgeon.