Introductory address delivered at Surgeon's Hall, Edinburgh, at the opening of the medical session, October 1866 / by Patrick Heron Watson.

  • Watson, Patrick Heron, 1832-1907.
Date:
1867
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Introductory address delivered at Surgeon's Hall, Edinburgh, at the opening of the medical session, October 1866 / by Patrick Heron Watson. 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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    tive narrative, but also invaluable by indelibly impressing upon your memory the features and characters of these early observed cases, so as to constitute in after life excellent standards of reference. To them at some future period you may betake yourselves, much in the same way that an artist will place before his eye some bit of harmonious grouping, or felicitous colouring which he had copied from a great master when as a pupil he studied in the galleries. There is still one other matter to which I must allude before I conclude this already too lengthy address, and that is, the necessity for sedulous attention to Dispensary practice. In the various dis- pensaries with which our city is fully supplied, the senior student is permitted to engage personally in the cure and treatment of the sick poor. He is thus early permitted to come in contact with the realities of disease, in a different sphere of life perhaps, but present- ing much the same phase as he will eventually experience in actual practice. He will then, if not before, discover what practice really is when stripped of the artificial circumstances of hospital residence. Here the study of disease, and of his fellow-man, when in his own humble dwelling laid low on the bed of sickness and death, will form a wholesome contrast in its sad and painful realities with what he had been accustomed to regard it when seen through the medium of clinical instruction. Here he will find himself at last combating disease, whicli for weeks has enfeebled the father of a family, and made a happy honest household destitute of the neces- saries of life; or standing in the gap ’twixt life and death, when the last enemy threatens to lay his remorseless grasp upon the only stay of a widowed mother, he feels as if, holding in his hands the issues of life, the burden and responsibility of professional duty had fallen too suddenly on his jouthful heart, and as, if under the continued strain of such anxieties, he could not long maintain his mental equilibrium. Such a position of conscious responsibility is surely likely to make a right-feeling man repent any negligence he has committed in his earlier student years, and bring home to every one the nece.ssity of due attention to every department of study which increases his practical usefulness. But there are scenes still more painfully trying which he must encounter, and from which, if he has any heart at all, he cannot stay away. When it is his part, as it will be yours, to stand by the bedside while life’s tide slowly ebbs away, and when in the now fast fleeting houra which alone separate the dying man from an eternity upon which he is about to enter without one ray of heavenly hope, with nothing to cheer the gloom of the dark valley, and with a mind panic-stricken by a fearful looking-for of judgment and fiery indignation, he has to listen to heartrending cries for aid when the damp, cold, clammy hand of the dying man clings fast to yours and refuses to let you go j when his eye seems greedily to
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