Dr. Chesterfield's letters to his son on medicine as a career / by Sir William B. Dalby.

  • William Bartlett Dalby
Date:
[between 1880 and 1889?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dr. Chesterfield's letters to his son on medicine as a career / by Sir William B. Dalby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    diplomacy, straightforwardness, wisdom, and knowledge of men will guide him so truly that the best is done for the patient, for the doctor in attendance, for the friends of the patient, for the public, for the medical profession, and I find myself almost adding for the Queen and country. May you, my dear son, be one of the selected if you adopt the role of the physician ! You will then be a tower of strength in times of difficulty and danger. I fancy I hear you saying as you read this, What an appalling array of qualities are required for this position ! Now I do not wish you to suppose that these qualities are ever all centred in one man, but some of them are sufficiently pronounced to influence the choice of the electorate. It is quite possible for any one to have noticed at some period during his life two very notable examples of what I am endeavouring to explain to you. Thus at one and the same time, so far as the fashionable portion of the London public and the newspaper-reading community in the country are concerned, there may flourish only two London physicians, and these may form a very marked contrast to each other. Both of them will be quite amongst the best that are known in regard to the knowledge of their profession, but may at first sight appear so different that one is led to wonder how they both can be so serviceable and so distinguished. The one is in no sense remarkable except that he is a sound physician, absolutely straightforward and reliable, and, beyond that he apparently has no little weaknesses, nothing more. But the other is something very much more. You cannot be in his presence without at once seeing that he is a very remark- able person—indeed, the sort of man that would have been dis- tinguished in whatever profession he had figured. What an excellent archbishop he would have made, or indeed a general! He would have made an admirable lord chancellor, but on second thoughts his proper place would have been diplomacy. I re- member one of the most brilliant diplomats of the day telling me one day that he had once been very ill and in the lowest spirits, but that when this physician came into the room, walked to his bedside and put his hand on him, he said to himself, ' Ah ! here comes the man that (rod Almighty has created to make me well.' This will give you an idea of the personality of this physician. And yet, my dear friend, so complex is the character of man, so rjaradoxical in some of his mental attitudes as they appear to the observer, that this man raised the art of sententiousness almost to a science, and there were occasions when he left the impression that he was a consummate actor. When you are older and have