fice so long, I should find it in the fact that human
anatomy is much the same study that it was in the days of Vesalius and
Fallopius, and that the greater part of my teaching was of such a nature
that it could never become antiquated.

Let me begin with my first experience as a medical student. I had come
from the lessons of Judge Story and Mr. Ashmun in the Law School at
Cambridge. I had been busy, more or less, with the pages of Blackstone
and Chitty, and other text-books of the first year of legal study. More
or less, I say, but I am afraid it was less rather than more. For during
that year I first tasted the intoxicating pleasure of authorship. A
college periodical, conducted by friends of mine, still undergraduates,
tempted me into print, and there is no form of lead-poisoning which more
rapidly and thoroughly pervades the blood and bones and marrow than that
which reaches the young author through mental contact with type-metal.
Qui a bu, boira,--he who has once been a drinker will drink again, says
the French proverb. So the man or woman who has tasted type is sure to
return to his old indulgence sooner or later. In that fatal year I had
my first attack of authors' lead-poisoning, and I have never got quite
rid of it from that day to this. But for that I might have applied
myself more diligently to my legal studies, and carried a green bag in
place of a stethoscope and a thermometer up to the present day.

What determined me to give up Law and apply myself to Medicine I can
hardly say, but I had from the first looked upon that year's study as an
experiment. At any rate, I made the change, and soon found myself
introduced to new scenes and new companionships.

I can scarcely credit my memory when I recall the first impressions
produced upon me by sights afterwards become so familiar that they could
no more disturb a pulse-beat than the commonest of every-day experiences.
The skeleton, hung aloft like a gibbeted criminal, looked grimly at me as
I entered the room devoted to the students of the school I had joined,
just as the fleshless figure of Time, with the hour-glass and scythe,
used to glare upon me in my childhood from the "New England Primer." The
white faces in the beds at the Hospital found their reflection in my own
cheeks, which lost their color as I looked upon them. All this had to
pass away in a little time; I had chosen my profession, and must meet its
painful and repulsive aspects until they lost