Page:Advice to Medical Students (1857) William Henry Fuller.djvu/6

6 command the respect and confidence of your fellow-men, you will probably fail to attain the pecuniary reward at which you aim, and assuredly will want that peace of mind without which riches are valueless.

Well! gentlemen, I will assume that, before choosing your profession, you have well considered its duties and responsibilities, and that you are here to-day with firm resolve to follow that good path which alone leads to real success and happiness. Experience, however, tells me that your feelings on this occasion are not of an unmixed, unalloyed character. You have your hopes and aspirations; but you are not without your fears and misgivings. How can it be otherwise? Strangers to London—arrived, perhaps, from a quiet country home—you find yourselves amidst the busy din of this vast metropolis, surrounded by strange faces, jostled by persons who neither know nor care for you, met on all sides by a cold indifference which excites a painful sense of isolation, and oppressed by the feeling that now, for the first time in your lives, you are thrown entirely on your own resources. There are few positions in life more anxious or more trying, and none certainly in which greater need is felt for counsel and assistance. Doubtless, your first impulse will be to relieve the tedium of your loneliness by making the acquaintance of your fellow-students. But let me beg of you not to be over hasty in so doing. At all times and in all societies there are to be found young men both good and bad, idle and industrious; men who are careless, reckless, and extravagant, with little self-respect, little sense of moral responsibility, and with few desires beyond the gratification of self-indulgence; and, on the other hand, men who are cautious, well-behaved, and of strict moral rectitude, whose anxious wish it is to qualify themselves for the practiee of their profession, and to take a high standing as good members of society. I am thankful to say that at St. George's Hospital there is a large proportion of men