Page:Advice to Medical Students (1857) William Henry Fuller.djvu/21

21 you in relation to your younger fellow-students, of setting an example of steady industry, and of striving after the attainment of practical knowledge.

I do not wish it to be understood that attendance in the wards of the hospital is to take the place of other prescribed means of instruction. On the contrary, it is essential for you to obtain a competent knowledge of all the various branches of medical science which are embraced in our curriculum; and he who acquires the largest amount of this knowledge will lay the surest foundation of future success. But a man may be a minute anatomist, a profound physiologist, an expert chemist, and nevertheless be an indifferent medical practitioner. No one can be fit to practise his profession who has not studied carefully by the bedside of the sick, and thus learned by constant observation and experience to trace symptoms back to their source and to interpret them correctly. Nothing can compensate for a neglect of this; and if you do not cultivate, carefully and diligently, the wide field of observation which is here provided for you, you will ever have occasion to repent your negligence.

There is yet one point to which I must refer before passing on to other topics. I mean your conduct and personal behaviour in the dissecting-room and in the dead-house and wards of the hospital. Few persons can enter a dissecting-room for the first time without a sense of reverential awe, inspired by their being in presence of the dead; and none can fail to have their feelings harrowed by the scenes which are being enacted there. But habit becomes a second nature, and after a time they learn to handle the lifeless corpse, they separate it limb from limb, particle from particle; they search out its structure, analyse its composition, and examine even by the microscope the fibres of whieh it is composed. Thus, by degrees, they acquire a familiarity with the aspect of death, which is apt to engender a feeling of indifference.