I warn you against all ambitious aspirations outside of your profession.  Medicine is the most difficult of sciences and the most laborious of arts.  It will task all your powers of body and mind if you are faithful to it.  Do not dabble in the muddy sewer of politics, nor linger by the enchanted streams of literature, nor dig in far-off fields for the hidden waters of alien sciences.  The great practitioners are generally those who concentrate all their powers on their business.  If there are here and there brilliant exceptions, it is only in virtue of extraordinary gifts, and industry to which very few are equal.

To get business a man mast really want it; and do you suppose that when you are in the middle of a heated caucus, or half-way through a delicate analysis, or in the spasm of an unfinished ode, your eyes rolling in the fine frenzy of poetical composition, you want to be called to a teething infant, or an ancient person groaning under the griefs of a lumbago?  I think I have known more than one young man whose doctor’s sign proclaimed 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.