nation which shows him what was the matter with a
patient, than in a case which insists on getting well and leaving him in
the dark as to its nature. Far more likely to interfere with the sound
practical balance of the mind is that speculative, theoretical tendency
which has made so many men noted in their day, whose fame has passed away
with their dissolving theories. Read Dr. Bartlett's comparison of the
famous Benjamin Rush with his modest fellow-townsman Dr. William Currie,
and see the dangers into which a passion for grandiose generalizations
betrayed a man of many admirable qualities.

I warn you against all ambitious aspirations outside of your profession.
Medicine is the most difficult of sciences and the most laborious of
arts. It will task all your powers of body and mind if you are faithful
to it. Do not dabble in the muddy sewer of politics, nor linger by the
enchanted streams of literature, nor dig in far-off fields for the hidden
waters of alien sciences. The great practitioners are generally those
who concentrate all their powers on their business. If there are here
and there brilliant exceptions, it is only in virtue of extraordinary
gifts, and industry to which very few are equal.

To get business a man mast really want it; and do you suppose that when
you are in the middle of a heated caucus, or half-way through a delicate
analysis, or in the spasm of an unfinished ode, your eyes rolling in the
fine frenzy of poetical composition, you want to be called to a teething
infant, or an ancient person groaning under the griefs of a lumbago? I
think I have known more than one young man whose doctor's sign proclaimed
his readiness to serve mankind in that capacity, but who hated the sound
of a patient's knock, and as he sat with his book or his microscope, felt
exactly as the old party expressed himself in my friend Mr. Brownell's
poem--

"All I axes is, let me alone."

The community soon finds out whether you are in earnest, and really mean
business, or whether you are one of those diplomaed dilettanti who like
the amusement of quasi medical studies, but have no idea of wasting their
precious time in putting their knowledge in practice for the benefit of
their suffering fellow-creatures.

The public is a very incompetent judge of your skill and knowledge, but
it gives its confidence most readily to those who stand well with their
professional brethren, whom they call upon when they themselves or their