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 their power over my sensibilities.

The private medical school which I had joined was one established by Dr. James Jackson, Dr. Walter Channing, Dr. John Ware, Dr. Winslow Lewis, and Dr. George W. Otis.  Of the first three gentlemen I have either spoken elsewhere or may find occasion to speak hereafter.  The two younger members of this association of teachers were both graduates of our University, one of the year 1819, the other of 1818.