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My message is chiefly to you, Students of Medicine, since
with the ideals entertained now your future is
indissolubly bound. The choice lies open, the paths are
plain before you. Always seek your own interests, make of
a high and sacred calling a sordid business, regard your
fellow-creatures as so many tools of trade, and, if your
heart's desire is for riches, they may be yours; but you
will have bartered away the birthright of a noble
heritage, traduced the physician's well-deserved title of
the Friend of Man, and falsified the best traditions of an
ancient and honorable Guild. On the other hand, I have
tried to indicate some of the ideals which you may
reasonably cherish. No matter though they are paradoxical
in comparison with the ordinary conditions in which you
work, they will have, if encouraged, an ennobling
influence, even if it be for you only to say with Rabbi
Ben Ezra, "What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me."
And though this course does not necessarily bring position
or renown, consistently followed it will at any rate give
to your youth an exhilarating zeal and a cheerfulness
which will enable you to surmount all obstacles--to your
maturity a serene judgment of men and things, and that
broad charity without which all else is naught--to your
old age that greatest of blessings, peace of mind, a
realization, maybe, of the prayer of Socrates for the
beauty in the inward soul and for unity of the outer and
the inner man; perhaps, of the promise of St. Bernard,
"Pax sine crimine, pax sine turbine, pax sine rixa."
--Osler, _Teacher and Student, Aequanimitas_.
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