ed 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
families are sick, whom they choose to honorable offices, whose writings
and teachings they hold in esteem. A man may be much valued by the
profession and yet have defects which prevent his becoming a favorite
practitioner, but no popularity can be depended upon as permanent which
is not sanctioned by the judgment of professional experts, and with
these you will always stand on your substantial merits.

What shall I say of the personal habits you must form if you wish for
success? Temperance is first upon the list. Intemperance in a physician
partakes of the guilt of homicide, for the muddled brain may easily
make a fatal blunder in a prescription and the unsteady hand transfix
an artery in an operation. Tippling doctors have been too common in the
history of medicine. Paracelsus was a sot, Radcliffe was much too fond
of his glass, and Dr. James Hurlbut of Wethersfield, Connecticut, a
famous man in his time, used to drink a square bottle of rum a day,
with a corresponding allowance of opium to help steady his nerves. We
commonly speak of a man as being the worse for liquor, but I was asking
an Irish laborer one day about his doctor, who, as he said, was somewhat
given to drink. "I like him best when he's a little that way," he said;
"then I can spake to him." I pitied the poor patient who could not
venture to allude to his colic or his pleurisy until his physician was
tipsy.

There are personal habits of less gravity than the one I have
mentioned which it is well to guard against, or, if they are formed,
to relinquish. A man who may be called at a moment's warning into
the fragrant boudoir of suffering loveliness should n