Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Self-development : an address to students / by George Ross. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.
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![wU], habits of thought and feeling, which distinguish man from his fellows in tho affairs of this Ufo. I suppose a man, armed at all pomts with scientific lore, cast suddenly into the midst of difficulty, when action is imperative, delay fatal; he is alarmed, confiised, paralysed; and with his fortitude his knowledge vanishes in the moment of his greatest need. To form the cha- racter, then, of the medical man should he one of our first objects. The transition from the quiet and monotony of rural hfe to the whirl, the excitement, and the dissipation of the metropolis, is, to a youth of eighteen, the greatest trial to which he can be subjected.. Tho new scene comes upon him hko a revelation. Ho is exposed to temptations and feels impulses to which ho was before a stranger. His nature undergoes a sudden develop- ment ; ideas enter that create new desires ; the passions awaken, and the soul walks abroad on a journey of observation, yearning to know more with each fresh acquisition. We will imagine a youth bred in the retirement of a ccimtry village, seeing nothing grander or finer than the old church or the modern school-house; finding his excitement in the impounding of a stray horse or the discovery of a hen's nest, his liveUost joy in the return of the bright Spring-time, with its May-blossom and its exhilarating breezes, its gray mornings, when the fish bite readily, and its meUow evenings, favourable for golf or cricket, his heart returning at night to the sanctuary—tho holiest and best beloved—^home, and his day's life disturbed by no guilty recollections or unavailing remorse, roimded with serene and refireshing slumber; imagine liim arrived in the metropolis, in the midst of long miles of squares, and streets, and alleys, mag- nificent parks, and filthy courts, gorgeous palaces and solemn temples, beneath whose dark shadows lie the squalid dens of poverty, profligacy, and crime ; its noble bridges, its river crowded with masts, its wharves with mer- chandise ; its opulence dazzling the eye fi-om every window; its thronged streets, its diversified pursuits, its uproar, its dreariness, its isolation, its con- trasts of grandeur and meanness, wealth and penury, purity and vice; its trading companies, political societies, and charitable institutions; its countless churches and reeking brothels; its hells and its hospitals. How would he regard this scene ?—what new emotions would not spring up in his breast? The world is all before him where to choose, but which to choose has been a problem on which many a youth has shipwrecked his destiny. Emancipated from the restraints of parental authority, and finding himseli surrounded by the fascinations and allurements of metropolitan life, the young man is apt to give the world a trial in the belief that he b so far master of hun- self as not to bo overcome by temptation, and that a few acts of folly may bo successfully concealed from the Icnowledge of those whose animadversions ho dreads. Let liim not yield to this delusion. All those men whose hopes have](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21477796_0004.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
