Page:Introductory lecture delivered in the Adelaide Hospital, Dublin, at the commencement of the clinical course, October 31, 1864 (IA b21916433).pdf/7

7 In the third place, he was a man of system. Without this, which he carried almost to the precision of a Martinet, he never could have got through the amazing amount of work he was accustomed to perform. I regret to say that this is one of many things in which medical students are usually deficient. Perhaps they are not altogether to blame for this, the extremely defective arrangements connected with the existing plan of medical education helping to produce it; but whatever the cause, the evil is greatly to be deplored. The want of habits of order tends to make their knowledge confused and inaccurate, entails upon them additional labour in acquiring it, and renders the retention of it in the memory a matter of greater difficulty.

Dr. Mayne was singularly felicitous in his descriptions of disease. He possessed the admirable tact of selecting the salient points of his cases, as well as of setting them before his readers, with a perspicuity and force of language that could not fail to represent the precise ideas he intended to convey. He did not exhaust attention by enumerating unimportant symptoms which had little bearing on the real nature of the affection; yet he omitted nothing that ought to be noticed. He was minute without being prolix; he was concise without being obscure. When he used technical terms it was not from pedantry, but because he felt that no other words would answer his purpose as well. Well, do I remember the brief but telling notes recorded in the prescription-books of the Whitworth Hospital, where he acted as clinical clerk to the late Dr. John Crumpton, when he handed them over to me as his successor, now nearly thirty years ago, which only required the outline to be filled up from his retentive memory to form a perfect history of each case, whenever subsequent circumstances should render such a course necessary.

It is scarcely requisite that I should add that he was enthusiastically devoted to his profession. He loved it for its own sake; and you may depend upon it, that without a natural taste for the pursuit, none of you will ever arrive at any real eminence in it. There is a wide difference