Page:Advice to Medical Students (1857) William Henry Fuller.djvu/7

7 belonging to this latter class; men whose advice you may safely follow and whose conduct you will do well to emulate; and I doubt not that, amongst your own immediate contemporaries, those who are now for the first time amongst us, there will be found many with like feelings and of like behaviour. Probably they may be of quiet, retiring dispositions, not over anxious to cultivate unknown acquaintances, and less ready, therefore, than others may be, to listen immediately to overtures of companionship. But do not on that account allow yourselves to become the associates of men who are less cautious, only because they have less reason to be particular. Rather let the discretion exercised by those whose conduct marks them as gentlemen in the true sense of the word, prove a warning to you to avoid a too hasty choice of your own companions. In the lecture-room, at the bedside of the suffering patient, and in presence of his corpse in the dead-house of the hospital, you will have ample opportunities of noting the characters of your fellow-students, and need have little difficulty in selecting your friends.

But I will go further in my advice to you respecting this important matter. My warning is directed not only against the idle and the dissolute, if such there should be found among you; but against the good-natured, well-meaning, but thoughtless, whose inexperience leads them to imagine that there can be no harm in a little temporary idleness and self-indulgence, a little time devoted to the so-called pleasures of a London life. Such men are desirous of earning a good character at the hospital, and intend ere long to work steadily and diligently, but they fancy that their movements here will be unwatched, their irregularities unnoticed, and that, for a time at least, they may neglect their duties with impunity. Gentlemen, there can be no mistake more fatal to your success and happiness. Thousands have trodden this dangerous road, and their example has shown, that he whose course is marked