Page:Advice to Medical Students (1857) William Henry Fuller.djvu/18

18 personal observation, the extent of the power which the body possesses of repairing functional or structural lesions? And yet further, how can you be either physicians or surgeons, how can you venture on the responsibility of practitioners charged with the safety of your patients' lives, if you neglect to bring your imperfect knowledge to the test of actual inspection in the dead-house, and thus learn to trace from their beginning to their end the different injuries you may be called upon to remedy, or the various diseases you may have to combat. It is only by lessons thus acquired, and frequently repeated, that you can obtain that practical insight into disease which will give you confidence in the sick-room, and serve as a guide to you in seasons of anxiety: it is thus, and thus alone, that you can lay the foundation of that knowledge which in any case of doubt or difficulty will render you of real use to your suffering fellow-creatures.

If there is one point more than another connected with my own professional education upon which I look back with unfeigned thankfulness, it is that during a long course of years I was led to spend many hours daily in the wards of this hospital. There is no school like Nature's, no storehouse upon which you can draw with so much certainty of obtaining what you seek. Only let your search be zealous and persevering, and I venture to say it will not fail to be successful. Go to the bedside with a note-book in your hand, preserve a record of the cases which come before you, illustrate them if you are able by sketches and drawings, and in the evening arrange them methodically, study their details, compare them with one another, and discuss them with your fellow-students. Whilst so doing many things .will occur to you which had previously escaped your notice; you will be led to view symptoms in a different light, or to trace some unobserved connection between them; and if you steadily follow out this system of note-taking, you will be surprised to find, when you leave