Page:Advice to Medical Students (1857) William Henry Fuller.djvu/15

15 history of those remedial agents which are profusely scattered through the realms of nature; and last, but not least in a practical point of view, the application of these various branches of knowledge to the alleviation of human suffering, the prevention and cure of disease, and the elucidation of legal investigations. Now the first impression usually produced by this formidable list of subjects, each one of which is a fitting study for a life, is that of helpless bewilderment; the mind is aghast at the vastness of the prospect which lies before it. But you must not permit yourselves to yield to this feeling. You must be sadly faint-hearted and utterly unfit for the journey of life if you allow yourselves to be daunted by the extent or roughness of the ground you have to traverse. There are few paths, however lengthy and rugged, and few difficulties, however great, which may not be surmounted by patient toil and firmness of purpose. What the poet has said of agriculture applies to every walk through life:

But believe me, the path which you are about to tread is not beset by any obstacles which may not be overcome by steady industry and application. It has its own, its special difficulties, but so has every walk through life, and he who would be useful, happy, and contented, must meet them in a proper spirit, and make the exertion which is necessary to overcome them. Amongst the earliest you will have to encounter is the multiplicity of new and isolated facts which will be brought before you in your different lectures; you will find yourselves unable to arrange and classify them, or to trace out their practical application; and until you do so, you will have no little difficulty in fixing them in the storehouse of your memory. But this is not peculiar to the study of medicine. It is a difficulty which meets every one who enters for the first time on a wide field of research, and it is