Page:Advice to Medical Students (1857) William Henry Fuller.djvu/17

17, and the like; you will learn that no precise line of treatment can be laid down which shall be applicable to these several varieties; that every case must be made the subject of special thought and special study; and that, although what you have learned from books and lectures may assist you in arriving at a correct decision, yet that your treatment must be directed by general principles deduced from personal observation of disease and of the effect of remedies. Yes, gentlemen, the most valuable knowledge we possess is that which we have acquired by long-continued observation and experience. It cannot to any great extent be communicated to others, either orally or by writing, and the utmost that can be said of books and lectures is that they are faithful outlines simplified and adapted for your instruction, and intended to be filled up by your personal observation. The sources whence you must derive the knowledge which will enable you to fill them up, are the dissecting-room, the wards, and the dead-house of the hospital. Let me beg of you then to go to those sources, and make the utmost use of your opportunities. Be patient in your inquiries, take nothing for granted, slur nothing over, make out everything for yourselves, and test the knowledge you have derived from others by an appeal to the result of your personal observation. How can you be good surgeons if you are not anatomists, familiar with the structure of the body you will have to operate on, practically acquainted by oft-repeated dissections, with the relative position of its several parts, and skilled by long-continued use of the scalpel to employ it cautiously and dexterously? How can you be physicians if you do not examine the functions of the living body, and note how they are affected by emotions of the mind, and by other moral and physical influences; if you do not learn to mark the early inroads of disease, and watch its onward progress; to ascertain the effects of different remedies under varying conditions of human suffering, and to estimate correctly, by