May I venture to contrast youth and experience in medical practice, something in the way the man painted the lion, that is, the lion under?

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows-the exceptions.  The young man knows his patient, but the old man knows also his patient’s family, dead and alive, up and down for generations.  He can tell beforehand what diseases their unborn children will be subject to, what they will die of if they live long enough, and whether they had better live at all, or remain unrealized possibilities, as belonging to a stock not worth being perpetuated.  The young man feels uneasy if he is not continually doing something to stir up his patient’s internal arrangements.  The old man takes things more quietly, and is much more willing to let well enough alone:  All these superiorities, if such they are,’you must wait for time to bring you.  In the meanwhile (if we will let the lion be uppermost for a moment), the young man’s senses are quicker than those of his older rival.  His education in all the accessory branches is more recent, and therefore nearer the existing condition of knowledge.  He finds it easier than his seniors to accept the improvements which every year is bringing forward.  New ideas build their nests in young men’s brains.  “Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles,” as I once heard it remarked, and the first whispers of a new truth are not caught by those who begin to feel the need of an ear-trumpet.  Granting all these advantages to the young man, he ought, nevertheless, to go on improving, on the whole, as a medical practitioner, with every year, until he has ripened into a well-mellowed maturity.  But, to improve, he must be good for something at the start.  If you ship a poor cask of wine to India and back, if you keep it a half a century, it only grows thinner and sharper.

You are soon to enter into relations with the public, to expend your skill and knowledge for its benefit, and find your support in the rewards of your labor.  What kind of a constituency is this which is to look to you as its authorized champions in the struggle of life against its numerous enemies?

In the first place, the persons who seek the aid of the physician are very honest and sincere in their wish to get rid of their complaints, and, generally speaking, to live as long as they can.  However attractively the future is painted to them, they are attached to the planet with which they are already acquainted.  They are addicted to the daily use of this empirical and unchemical mixture which we call air; and would hold on to it as a tippler does to his alcoholic drinks.  There is nothing men will not do, there is nothing they have not done, to recover their health and save their lives.  They have submitted to be half-drowned in water, and half-choked with gases, to be buried up to their chins in earth, to be seared with hot irons like galley-slaves, to be crimped with knives, like cod-fish, to have needles thrust into their flesh, and bonfires kindled on their skin, to swallow all sorts of abominations, and to pay for all this, as if to be singed and scalded were a costly privilege, as if blisters were a blessing, and leeches were a luxury.  What more can be asked to prove their honesty and sincerity?