On mental training and relaxation in the study of medicine / [J. Brown].

  • Brown, J, active approximately 1851.
Date:
[1851]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On mental training and relaxation in the study of medicine / [J. Brown]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    over all others. A man may have a genius for governing, for killing, or for curing the greatest number of men, and in the best possible manner; a man may have a genius for the fiddle, or his mission may be for the tight-rope, or the Jew’s harp, or it may be a natural turn for seeking, and finding, and teaching truth, and for doing the greatest possible good to mankind—or it may be a turn equally natural for seeking, and finding, and teaching a lie, and doing the maximum of mischief. It was as natural, as inevit¬ able, for Wilkie to develop himself into a painter, and such a painter, as for an acorn when planted to grow up into an oak, a specific quercus rohur. But genius is not enough, even for a painter, he must likewise have sense; and what is sense? Sense drives, or ought to drive, the coach ; sense regulates, combines, restrains, commands, all the rest—even the genius; and sense implies exact¬ ness, soundness, power, and promptitude of mind. Then fior the young doctor, he must have as his main, his master faculty, SENSE—vovs^ justness of mind, because his subject-matter is one in which principle works, rather than impulse, as in painting; the understanding has first to do with it, however much it is worthy of the full exercise of the feelings, and the affections. But all will not do, if GENIUS is not there,—a real turn for the profession. It may not be a liking for it—some of the best of its practitioners never really liked it, at least, liked other things better; but there must be a fitness of faculty of body and mind for its full, constant, exact pursuit. This sense and this genius, such a special thera¬ peutic gift, had Hippocrates, Sydenham, Pott, Pinel, John Hunter, Delpech, Dupuytren, Kellie, Cheyne, Baillie, and Abercrombie. We might, to pursue the subject, pick out painters who had great genius and little or no sense, and vice versa; and physicians and surgeons, who had sense without genius, and genius without sense, and some perhaps who had neither, and yet were noticeable, and, in their own sideways, useful men. But one great object will be gained if we have given our young readers (and these remarks are addressed exclusively to students) any idea of what we mean, if we have made them think, and look inwards. The noble and sacred science you have entered on is large, difficult, and deep, beyond most others—it is every day getting more immense, more deep, and in many senses more difficult, more complicated and involved. It requires more than the average in¬ tellect, energy, attention, patience, and courage, and that singular but imperial quality, at once a gift and an acquirement, presence of mind—ayxivoLay or nearness of the vovs, as the subtile Greeks called iVthan almost any other department of human thought and action, except perhaps that of ruling men. Therefore it is, that we hold it to be of paramount importance that the parents, teachers, and friends of youths intended for medicine, and above all that those who examine them on their entering on their studies, should at least (we might safely go much further) satisfy themselves as far as they can, that