Page:Advice to Medical Students (1857) William Henry Fuller.djvu/16

16 one which at this hospital may be readily overcome. Whenever you are in doubt or perplexity, inquire of your elder fellow-students, consult your teachers, refer to your text-books, and turn again and again to Nature's pages. Like travellers in a strange country, question every person you meet respecting the road along which you are journeying, and glean from them as much information as possible; but do not rely upon such precarious sources of knowledge. Regard attentively everything that comes before you; note every landmark, every object, however small and trifling it may appear; mark well their position and mutual relations, and endeavour day by day to recall what you have seen, and retrace in your mind each step you have taken. So, by degrees, the face of the country will become familiar to you; each object which has met your view, each fact you have acquired, will serve as the basis of further research, until at length the road which at first seemed dark, dreary, and perplexing, will prove bright, interesting, and agreeable.

I cannot too strongly impress upon you the necessity of observing and thinking for yourselves; you are, as I have said, like travellers in a strange country, and you are bound to act accordingly. Begin by a careful study of your charts — those books and lectures which are furnished for your guidance and instruction, and endeavour thus to make yourselves acquainted with the facts collected by the patient investigation of your predecessors. But when you have thus obtained a knowledge of your position, and gleaned some insight into the course to be pursued, you must turn to Nature and consult her landmarks. Your further progress will depend entirely on your so doing. You will soon begin to find that books are poor interpreters of Nature's works; that disease is not so simple and straightforward an affair as authors would lead you to suppose, but varies infinitely in type, and presents a multitude of different phases according to age, sex,