As soon as the summer course begins, the Botanical Lectures commence with
it, and the polite Company of Apothecaries courteously request the
student's acceptance of a ticket of admission to the lectures, at their
garden at Chelsea. As these commence somewhere about eight in the morning,
of course he must get up in the middle of the night to be there; and
consequently he attends very often, of course. But the botanical
excursions that take place every Saturday from his own school are his
especial delight. He buys a candle-box to contain all the chickweed,
chamomiles, and dandelions he may collect, and slinging it over his
shoulder with his pocket-handkerchief, he starts off in company with the
Professor and his fellow-herbalists to Wandsworth Common, Battersea
Fields, Hampstead Heath, or any other favourite spot which the cockney
Flora embellishes with her offspring.
The conduct of medical students on botanical excursions generally appears
in various phases. Some real lovers of the study, pale men in spectacles,
who wear shoes and can walk for ever, collect every weed they drop upon,
to which they assign a most extraordinary name, and display it at their
lodgings upon cartridge paper, with penny pieces to keep the leaves in
their places as they dry. Others limit their collections to
stinging-nettles, which they slyly insert into their companions' pockets,
or long bulrushes, which they tuck under the collars of their coats; and
the remainder turn into the first house of public entertainment they
arrive at on emerging from the smoke of London to the rural districts, and
remain all day absorbed in the mysteries of ground billiards and
knock-'em-downs, their principal vegetable studies being confined to
lettuces, spring onions, and water-cresses. But all this is very
proper--we mean the botanical part of the story--for the knowledge of the
natural class and order of a buttercup must be of the greatest service to
a practitioner in after-life in treating a case of typhus fever or
ruptured blood-vessel. At some of the Continental Hospitals, the pupil's
time is wasted at the bedside of the patient, from which he can only get
practical information. How much better is the primrose-investigating
_curriculum_ of study observed at our own medical schools!
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