Page:The Hunterian Oration for 1850.djvu/36

 fact, that the path to medical knowledge is steep and dangerous, and that its requirements are often of a nature repugnant to delicacy of feeling—that. it involves an intercourse with objects, from which the senses may well revolt, with disgust and loathing. Be it remembered, that his services are perilous from their outset, and that a large proportion of the profession pursue their anxious and laborious career, often unchequered by the recreation of a single day, throughout a life of daily companionship with sorrow, contagion, disease, and death. Of domestic joy, he knows nothing but in name. From the comforts of his home, his easy chair, his winter’s fireside, he is estranged by incessant toil, the slave of caprice, of ignorance, of groundless apprehension. While other members of his family seek that repose which nature calls for at the termination of the day, he is perhaps summoned to a distant village, to minister to the temporary relief of a disease he cannot cure; devoting to reflection while on horseback, amidst the sleet of a winter’s night, those hours that should be engaged in invigorating his mind and body for the pursuits of the morrow.

For the influence of these occupations on the physical health of the members of our profession, let me point to the bills of mortality, which teach us, that they sink too often unrewarded into an early grave.

Such are the intellectual, and such the moral requisites of our profession—such the qualifications, and such the duties of him who, beyond any competitor, ministers to the physical and moral sufferings of humanity.

Nor is this condition, altogether unmerited by the practitioner of medicine. With largely increased resources, the