Page:Advice to Medical Students (1857) William Henry Fuller.djvu/11

11 nin [sic] regard to you. You cannot neglect your duties now, and regain your lost time by labour hereafter. Now is the season for preparing your land and sowing the seed, which, if carefully tended, will hereafter bear an abundant crop; this is your time for steady labour, your only opportunity of laying a secure foundation for the future. At present you have health and vigour to prosecute your studies, you have hopes to realise, good intentions to carry out, elasticity of spirit to urge you forwards, and your minds are undistracted by cares and unbiassed by preconceived or erroneous notions. But this state of things will not continue long. Before many years have passed you will have entered on the active business of life, and will find yourselves engaged in a struggle for your daily bread. There will be little time for study then. Each day will bring with it its own labour, its own peculiar cares and anxieties, and with your time occupied by multifarious engagements, and your minds harassed by responsibilities and anxieties, you will find little opportunity for regular study, and will feel unequal to close and continued mental application. If you neglect your present season of improvement, you will then discover how great and irreparable a loss you have sustained. You will be constantly in want of that very knowledge which ought to have been acquired at the outset of your career, and which can hardly be attained without beginning your education anew; and, dispirited by a sense of your own incompetence, and nettled by the success of your more diligent fellow-students, you will be assailed by never-ceasing, but useless regrets.

Do not imagine, that the warning I am giving you is prompted by any special misgiving as to your future conduct. Judging by my own observation of medical students—and my experience is drawn chiefly from St. George's Hospital—I believe them, on the whole, to be as moral, well-conducted, and diligent, as any class of men of their age and position.