Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 1.djvu/450

 the revolution which the profession has, within the last half century, undergone, he is superseded in the treatment of all the more simple and ordinary diseases, by the general practitioner. His office is become chiefly that of consulting practitioner, to be referred to, when disease becomes intractable, or the more immediate attendant deems it expedient to divide the responsibility; and for this office, experience is the grand requisite. Yet how is the experience of the young physician to be formed, on the scanty share of practice which the present state of the profession allots to him, unless he obtain, in addition, the wider field of observation which hospitals or dispensaries supply? If he have not the good fortune to procure some such appointment, he has to endure the double mortification of feeling that all his laboriously acquired knowledge is profitless, from want of exercise; and that this inactivity, sufficiently painful in itself, directly unfits him, through the deficiency of means for extending his knowledge, for that species of practice which might, in time, devolve on him. It would be a melancholy recital which should record the fate of the many ingenuous and highly cultivated minds, that have sunk under the complicated difficulties with which they have thus had to struggle. Many such, and, perhaps, not the least estimable, daily wither in their bloom, disappear, and are forgotten; while ignorance of their fate misleads others to engage in the same cheerless career, betraying them into hopes and expectations never to be realised.

It was Dr. Thackeray's happier lot to be rescued from this pitiable state, by the very energies which