Page:Advice to Medical Students (1857) William Henry Fuller.djvu/9

9 different modes in which that mechanism may become de ranged, and the means which science places at our command to assist in removing impediments to its action. It is a study to engross your whole attention, even if it had no relation to your future career through life. But forming as it does the groundwork of that profession which you have deliberately chosen, you are bound to devote your whole energies to its prosecution. You are bound to do so for the sake of your own reputation and future happiness; for the sake of those friends who have given you your education, and who are still assisting you, and for the sake of those poor suffering fellow-creatures who hereafter will look to you for relief. Above all, you are bound to do so as the servants of an All-wise Providence, who has been pleased to enrol you among the number of those whom He employs as the channels of His mercy and the ministers of His earthly blessings, and who one day will require at your hands an account of the talents committed to your charge.

Gentlemen, you have no time to lose. You have much to do during the next three years which cannot be done at any other period of your lives. You have not only to acquire a knowledge of a profession which, in a scientific point of view, has deeper and wider foundations than almost any other; but even now, whilst your natures are plastic and your characters are being moulded, you must learn to regulate your feelings and behaviour, to discipline your mind, and to train yourselves strictly in the path of moral rectitude. You must cultivate habits of order, method, and punctuality, so as to be able to economise your time; you must acquire the habit of directing your whole attention to the subject before you, so as to analyse and reason on it correctly; you must learn to be exact in observation and scrupulously accurate in your record of facts; to discriminate between the important and the unimportant, and so to arrange and classify your knowledge as to