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was elected for Salisbury by a large majority; was re-elected after two pretty hard contests; and kept his seat until, after the sudden death of a managing clerk in whom he had placed a too unlimited confidence, he was led to accept the Chiltern Hundreds.

As to myself, it was determined that I should embark in some part of the medical profession. Dr. Denman had married one of my father's sisters. Dr. Baillie and Sir Richard Croft had married my first cousins. The great reputation which they had respectively acquired perhaps led my father to give my mind this direction, and disposed me to be easily guided according to his wishes. However that may have been, in the autumn of 1801 I was sent to London, and there entered on those pursuits which have been the chief object of my life.

Others have often said to me that they supposed that I must have had, from the first, a particular taste or liking for my profession. But it was no such thing; nor does my experience lead me to have any faith in those special callings to certain ways of life which some

young men are supposed to have. For the most part, these are mere fancies, which are liable to give way to other fancies with as little reason as they themselves first began to exist. Such persons take the ignotum pro magnifico; and when they find that the magnificum is not equal to their expectations, they as readily fly to something else. The persons who succeed best in professions are those who, having (perhaps from some accidental circumstance) been led to embark in them, persevere in their course as a matter of duty, or because they have nothing better to do. They often feel their new pursuit to be unattractive enough in the beginning; but as they go on, and acquire knowledge, and find that they obtain some degree of credit, the case is altered; and from that time, they become every day more interested in what they are about. There is no profession to which these observations are more applicable than they are to the medical. The early studies are, in some respects, disagreeable to all, and to many repulsive. But in the practical exercise of its duties in the hospital, there is much that is of the

highest interest; and the collateral sciences, to those whose position gives them the opportunity of cultivating them, offer at least as much to gratify our curiosity and excite our admiration as any other branches of knowledge, not even excepting the sublime investigations of astronomy.

When I first came as an adventurer to London, I knew as little as possible of the profession for which I was destined, and I had to grope my way in it as well as I could by myself. I soon found that I could not be a physician without a University degree. My father had sent none of us to Oxford or Cambridge. I do not certainly know why he did not do so; for although, with his family of six children, his pecuniary means were limited, we were far beyond ordinary schoolboys in our knowledge of Greek and Latin; and I have known many much inferior to ourselves, as to these studies, who were able to obtain exhibitions such as, with what he could have done for us, would have enabled us to obtain an academical education, and put us in the way of rising in the Uni

versity afterwards.

I suspect that for these ancient seats of learning, as they were then constituted, he had no very great respect, and that he feared that we might there lose those habits of persevering industry which he had been at so great pains to give us.

He

During my first season in London, I attended Mr. Abernethy's lectures on Anatomy. was an admirable teacher. He kept up our attention so that it never flagged, and that what he told us could not be forgotten. He did not tell us so much as some other lecturers; but what he did, he told us well. His lectures were full of original thought, of luminous and almost poetical illustrations, the tedious details of descriptive anatomy being occasionally relieved by appropriate and amusing anecdotes, which, though they had been repeated over and over again, as one course succeeded another, were very agreeable to us new-comers. Like most of his pupils, I was led to look up to him as a being of a superior order, and I could conceive nothing better than to follow in his footsteps; and thus I was led to regard the

department of the profession to which he belonged as that to which I should belong myself. Of this conclusion I have never since had reason to repent; and after an experience of fifty years, I am confirmed in the opinion that the pursuit of what is called pure surgery, such as it is in large cities, in connection with a hospital and a medical school, is more replete with interest, and, on the whole, more satisfactory, than any of the other branches into which the ars medendi is divided.

Although I never even dreamed of retracing my steps, nor allowed myself to think that I could venture to do so, it must be confessed that there was much which tended to damp my ardour in the beginning. A very few days were sufficient to overcome the disgust occasioned by my first entry into the dissecting-room; but the study of bones and muscles and bloodvessels was far from being attractive in the first instance, after the very different studies in which I had been previously engaged. Now, in the theatre and the dissecting-room, I felt, though with numbers around me, like a solitary person.

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