Rizal first studied under the tutelage of Justiniano Aquino Cruz in Biñan, Laguna. He was sent to Manila and upon enrolling at the Ateneo Municipal, changed his name to "Rizal" to escape the opprobrium of the name "Mercado". His brother Paciano had been linked to the Filipino priests Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora who had been tried as subversives and sentenced to death by garrote. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1877 and graduated as one of the nine students declared sobresaliente or outstanding. He continued his education at the Ateneo Municipal to obtain a land surveyor and assessor's degree, and at the same time at the University of Santo Tomas where he studied Philosophy and Letters. Upon learning that his mother was going blind, he decided to study medicine specializing in ophthalmology at the University of Santo Tomas but did not complete it because he felt that Filipinos were being discriminated against by the Dominicans who were operating the school.[9]
Without his parents' knowledge and consent, but secretly supported by his brother Paciano, he traveled alone to Madrid in May 1882 and studied medicine at the Universidad Central de Madrid where he earned the degree, Licentiate in Medicine. His education continued at the University of Paris and the University of Heidelberg where he earned a second doctorate. In Berlin, he was inducted as a member of the Berlin Ethnological Society and the Berlin Anthropological Society under the patronage of the famous pathologist Rudolf Virchow. Following custom, he delivered an address in German in April 1887 before the anthropological society on the orthography and structure of the Tagalog language. He left Heidelberg a poem, "A las flores del Heidelberg," which was both an evocation and a prayer for the welfare of his native land and the unification of common values between East and West.
Rizal's multifacetedness was described by his German friend, Dr. Adolf Meyer, as "stupendous."[10][11] Documented studies show him to be a polymath with the ability to master various skills and subjects.[1][2][12] He was an ophthalmologist, sculptor, painter, educator, farmer, historian, inventor, playwright and journalist. Besides poetry and creative writing, he dabbled, with varying degrees of expertise, in architecture, cartography, economics, ethnology, anthropology, sociology, dramatics, martial arts, fencing and pistol shooting. He was a Freemason