Page:Advice to Medical Students (1857) William Henry Fuller.djvu/14

14 possess physical powers of no common order, powers which shall enable him to endure a vast amount of anxiety and fatigue without producing exhaustion of his energies; and even then he will need a happy combination of circumstances to place him in positions favorable to the display of his talents and acquirements. The same holds good of other professions as well as our own; the highly gifted and more fortunate must rise to the top: but there are few professions—I believe there is hardly one—in which a man who resolves to do his duty, and to improve the talents wherewith he is blessed, can reckon with so much certainty on attaining an honorable position in society, and wealth sufficient to maintain him there. Assuredly there is none which will give him more opportunities of benefiting his fellow-creatures, or which in the retrospect will afford him greater satisfaction.

It is not my intention, on the present occasion, to offer you any advice as to the mode of studying the various subjects which form the groundwork of medical knowledge. This must be left to your respective teachers, who, in their several classes, will tell you what to do, and how to do it. But I think I may venture on some general remarks which may prove of use to you at the present time. You will find that your course is extremely varied. It embraces the study of anatomy, or the intimate structure of the human body, with its endless array of bones, muscles, and ligaments, its glands, nerves, and blood-vessels; of physiology, or the functions of that body and its various parts, the independence of their action and their mutual relation—the most complex and mysterious of medical investigations; of pathology, or the derangements which the bodily functions undergo, and the structural changes which may be produced by disease; of botany, which is deeply interesting and important; of chemistry, the handmaid of modern discovery, the most rapidly progressive of all sciences; of Materia Medica, or the natural