Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Valedictory Address to the Graduating Class of Jefferson Medical College, at the Forty-Fifth Annual Commencement: Delivered in the Academy of Music, March 12, 1870
But why multiply examples to show you what you can do, if you will; what you should do, if you would perform rightly your duty; what you will do, if you are true to the grand and im perishable instincts of your being. Many there are who will laugh at your efforts, and pronounce them incompatible with the so-called practical duties of your profession. When such speak to you of impossibilities, your answer is plain. It is the answer of Tell to the boatman, when the latter said, It is impossible to cross the lake in such a storm as this. I know not, said the Alpine Hero, whether it be impossible, but I know that it must be attempted.
Though I urge you to the zealous cultivation of purely medical studies, do not make the mistake of supposing that you should read and think of nothing but disease and the remedies for its relief. The tendency of_ such injurious devotion is to contract the mind and shut out from it those large and comprehensive views of your profession and its relations which you should always seek to obtain, and which you can obtain by the observation and comparison only, of many and diversified facts. The mind is best disciplined and strengthened by a certain well-regulated variety of study. Right] y considered, this variety is a form of rest and recreation; and these the mind requires as well as the body. The continuous monotone of falling water wearies the ear insufferably, and sleep visits the eye too long fixed on the waving grain. So the mind exerted over long upon one subject loses its vigor and becomes listless and apathetic. From time to time during your career, therefore, especially in the early days of probation, and of that hope deferred which maketh the heart sick, you may occasionally turn your attention with much profit to the collateral sciences. They will serve to enlarge the range of your mental vision. Medicine, it is true, is not a science. Though its infancy was passed in the rough cradle of experience, its vigor ous manhood must be sustained by science. Hence, to be truly rational, and, therefore, regular practitioners, you must endeavor, as far as possible, to practise and to cultivate your profession as scientific men. For the medical profession during twenty centuries has always industriously cultivated and been the chief promoter of natural knowledge. At the present time those sciences which.
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