e to the young graduate. Your relations to your
professional brethren may be a source of lifelong happiness and growth
in knowledge and character, or they may make you wretched and end
by leaving you isolated from those who should be your friends and
counsellors. The life of a physician becomes ignoble when he suffers
himself to feed on petty jealousies and sours his temper in perpetual
quarrels. You will be liable to meet an uncomfortable man here and there
in the profession,--one who is so fond of being in hot water that it is
a wonder all the albumen in his body is not coagulated. There are common
barrators among doctors as there are among lawyers,--stirrers up of
strife under one pretext and another, but in reality because they like
it. They are their own worst enemies, and do themselves a mischief each
time they assail their neighbors. In my student days I remember a good
deal of this Donnybrook-Fair style of quarrelling, more especially in
Paris, where some of the noted surgeons were always at loggerheads, and
in one of our lively Western cities. Soon after I had set up an office,
I had a trifling experience which may serve to point a moral in this
direction. I had placed a lamp behind the glass in the entry to indicate
to the passer-by where relief from all curable infirmities was to be
sought and found. Its brilliancy attracted the attention of a devious
youth, who dashed his fist through the glass and upset my modest
luminary. All he got by his vivacious assault was that he left portions
of integument from his knuckles upon the glass, had a lame hand, was
very easily identified, and had to pay the glazier's bill. The moral is
that, if the brilliancy of another's reputation excites your belligerent
instincts, it is not worth your while to strike at it, without
calculating which of you is likely to suffer most, if you do.

You may be assured that when an ill-conditioned neighbor is always
complaining of a bad taste in his mouth and an evil atmosphere about
him, there is something wrong about his own secretions. In such
cases there is an alterative regimen of remarkable efficacy: it is a
starvation-diet of letting alone. The great majority of the profession
are peacefully inclined. Their pursuits are eminently humanizing, and
they look with disgust on the personalities which intrude themselves
into the placid domain of an art whose province it is to heal and not to
wound.

The intercourse of teacher and student i