Page:Introductory Lecture 109 Medical Department University of Pennsylvania Stille.djvu/9

 or political distinction without the qualities that fit them for it or the virtues that deserve it, and they will “stoop to anything that’s base,” and barter honor, and even self-respect to obtain places for which they are unfit, and would be unworthy to fill.

I am no eulogist of the “good old times” because they are old, but because in many things they were good, and in none more so than in acting upon the inexorable law of nature, that all permanent things are slow in reaching their maturity, and that all rapid organic developments are feeble and short-lived in proportion to the rapidity of their growth. Strength in a complex structure depends upon the strength of its component parts, and if these are weak, and loosely put together, the building, the monument, the plant, the animal, or the mind will be proportionately feeble, and liable to destruction under the first strain or storm. It never has been and never will be that a mind hastily stuffed and overladen with knowledge will profit by it to grow in stature and strength. If it is not crushed at, once into imbecility, it may perhaps flash into a precocious brilliancy, which will be followed by an endless night of star-lit mediocrity.

Now, gentlemen, you have come together here to be made physicians, and I entreat you let us have a clear understanding of what can and what cannot be accomplished. To make you physicians by conferring a diploma upon you after the usual examination is a duty which we shall be very happy to perform; but it will not rest with us alone to make you deserve that distinction. The more sagacious and thoughtful of those who receive it know best of all how unfit they are to perform the duties of medical practitioners, and even when experience has made them familiar with these duties, they grow every year less absolute in anticipating favorable results, and less confident in the efficacy of art as distinguished from nature. Will you allow me then to endeavor to present to you some notion of the place which medicine appears to occupy in the field of knowledge, the limits of its power, and the attractions which it possesses for the liberally cultivated mind.

Every profession or pursuit in which a man is long trained,