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THE  MEDICAL COMMENCEMENT
OF THE
eolttwtuau <&ollt&t> M> <&.
MARCH 11, 1829
BY JAMES M. STAUGHTOIT, M. D.
       PUOFT.SSOH OF 9UHGERY,
   DEAN OF THE MEDICAL DEPARTMENT.
    WASHINGTON CITY:
PRINTED BY STEPHEN C. USTICK,
          1829. 
 
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Gentlemen,
        In the name of tjie Professors of the Medical
Department,-permit me to offer you our hearty congra-
tulations on the honours you have this day received, and
to welcome you into the ranks of our profession with
the most affectionate friendship.
   You  have  reached the goal on which your eye has
been so steadily fixed during the period of your studies;
and, from the elevation on which you now stand, a
broader and a brighter prospect is  spread before you.
You rejoice in the anticipations of the future, and your
teachers are prepared to offer the fervent  prayer, that
that future may bring you reputation, happiness, and
prosperity.  It is natural that you should  feel lively
joy at the outset of your career. Your morning is bright
and cloudless. The science you have selected, and of
which you have been judged so worthy, is justly rank-
ed among the  most elevated in its nature—the most be-
neficial in its tendency.   The  practitioner of medicine,
with which character you have just been clothed, is one
whose  ministry commands  the respect of men—the
admiration of  sages.   The mightiest rulers of the earth
confide  their lives to his care, and blindly follow his
ordinances.   By the continued exercise of his benevo-
lent functions  he becomes the benefactor of the commu-
nity, and by the empire he exercises over  Death, he is
(with reverence be it spoken,)  in some measure, the
representative of Divinity upon the earth. 
1
  The diseases of the mind, in all their dark and almost
inscrutable forms—furious  mania,  hypochondria  that
monster of a  thousand shapes,  moiling  melancholy,
drivelling idiocy, and the varying effects of the passions
in their thousand  attitudes and colours—are brought
under his subjection:  and the empire of the mind, as
well as that of the body, yields obedience to his potent
remedies.
   If the  magnitude of its  aims, if the success of its
endeavours, if the benevolence of its motives, if the
learning,  the  talents and the  virtue  of its  members,
contribute any thing  towards  the  respectability  of  a
profession, then, Gentlemen, have you just reason for
that pride, and  for that exultation, which you at this
moment  feel   at  the association  which has just  been
accomplished.
   But to  these honours are joined responsibilities of the
most awful character.   You are  about to enter into
contract  with  men for their lives !   If you err, through
ignorance or  neglect,  their blood will  be required at
jour hand !
   I call upon you on this solemn occasion,  in the pre-
sence of jour assembled fellow-citizens, to sacrifice, on
the altar of Medical Science, every selfish motive !  Yrou
are no longer to live for yourselves.  You have this day
devoted  yourselves to the cause of suffering humanity.
You are henceforward  to allow yourselves no pleasures
no engagements,  that will interfere with your profes-
sional duties.  You will have  to support the obloquy,
the caprice,   the  ingratitude of  men—to expose your
lives when the wide  wasting  pestilence  desolates the
land—at all  times,  and in all places, to manifest an
 unwavering courage,  an inexhaustible patience: in one 
word,  to live a life, of continued self-denial and priva-
tion.   Have you calculated on these duties?  Are you
prepared for these sacrifices ?
  We present you to the public, not as ordinary gra-
duates in medicine,  of whose qualifications we  know
little more than that which the result of a casual exa-
mination may have exhibited.  The  smallness of out-
numbers has brought us into daily contact, and afforded
us an  accurate knowledge of the success with which
you  have followed your course of studies, and of the
zeal with  which  you  have  improved  your  practical
advantages.  Your success is thus rendered the more
honourable, an 1 our persuasion of your future respec-
tability and usefulness  the more confident.
  You  at this moment resemble the mariner who is
about to leave a quiet  and a  peaceful shore.  You are
prepared for the voyage—all  is ready for your depar-
ture—you are putting off into the stream—you will soon
spread your snowy canvass to the wind.  Heaven grant
that, with prosperous gales to propel you forward, and
with the hand of Providence to steer your bark, you
may safely traverse the stormy sea of professional life.
  You  go, Gentlemen! but remember, 1 beseech you,
that you leave behind, friends who are anxious for your
happiness, and jealous  for your reputation.  And when
the rough surges of the ocean are roaring around  you,
and  when the storm of adversity is  beating on  your
head, you will know where to find warm hearts to sym-
pathise and console,  and active hands to relieve you.
  At the outset of your career you  will be placed in
situations of peculiar delicacy, and under circumstances
of the most distressing difficulty. The eyes  of  your
fellow-citizens in  general,  and of your fellow practi- 
6
tioners in particular, are placed on you from the begin
ning.  Yrour moral and your professional conduct will
be scrutinized with the greatest closeness.  Circumspec-
tion,  uprightness, and  unremitting  attention to your
business,  will ensure you  success : they cannot fail.
  The young practitioner, conscious of his knowledge,
becomes impatient, and but  too often disconsolate, at
seeing the ignorant pretender advanced by rapid strides
to reputation and fortune,  while he languishes in obscu-
rity and penury.  Should  such feelings ever cross your
minds,  remember that  surreptitious  reputation  is  as
easily lost as it is acquired; and that though boasting
noise and intriguing arts  may delude the people for a
while, gold will not  always be confounded with dross ;
and  that  eventually your talents will be discovered,
and  your reputation established  on a basis firm and
immutable.  The Roman  poet tells us, that the world
exhibits not a spectacle of equal grandeur with that of
a virtuous man  struggling  with adversity.  I have often
thought, as I have contemplated the young practitioner
of medicine toiling almost against hope, dispirited and
downcast, faint yet pursuing, neglected and unknown,
that  such a sight might well demand our warmest  ad-
miration.
  I would that time allowed me to enter more at large
into these scenes, and  to offer you  such advice as  the
experience of the most distinguished of our profession
has sanctioned; but the interesting duties in which we
have  this morning been  engaged*  have occupied  so

  * The Inauguration of the Rev. S. Chapix, D. D. as President
of the College, preceded the  conferring of the Deo-rees on the
Medical Graduates. 
7
large a portion of our time, that I shall use the utmost
brevity in the few further remarks 1 have to offer.
  Hippocrates, a name dear to the profession,  with
that peculiar  terseness  that characterizes his writings,
gives in a few words his idea of the character which a
physician ought to sustain :  " In a physician," says he,
"there should be a  contempt for  money, a sense  of
"shame, plainness and cleanliness in dress, judgment,
"gentleness,  urbanity,  promptness of speech, freedom
" from superstition,  and  great  integrity."  Make this
aphorism your study—shape your course by its maxims.
  A wise and beneficent  Creator has implanted in our
bosoms a desire of excellence—a thirst after reputation.
When this ardour for distinction in the medical profes-
sion is really a sentiment of the soul, when it is inspired
by  the love of glory, it is laudable in its possessor, and
uniformly increases  his usefulness to his fellow men;
but when it  is nothing more than a thirst for  gold, it
soon renders  him unjust—it debases and degrades him,
by the various manoeuvres it  suggests.  Interest  is the
cause of the most disgusting meanness; and though
frequently the foundation of unjust reputation, it event-
ually  dishonours its possessor.
   In your relations  to your fellow-practitioners, I must
counsel  you, strenuously, to mantain a spirit  of good
will and friendship.  Our profession has been too much
torn and distracted  by contention among its members.
The seeds of discord have been sown among us with
an unsparing hand.  Cultivate, as far as in you lies,
the better feelings of the soul.  Imitate the example of
the artist, who never speaks of the production of  a co-
temporary but in terms of praise.  There is something
noble and generous  in such  a course of conduct that 
                         8

will call forth the admiration of your friends, and will
ensure the approbation of that silent monitor, whose
decisions are to each of us so important.
  Towards the aged  members of the profession  shew
more than even Lacedemonian reverence.  Those who
have been engaged  in the work of benevolence before
we came into existence, whose lives have been one con-
tinued act of mercy in this lower world ; those who have
remembered the widow and  the  fatherless; those  on
whom the blessing  of them that were ready to perish
is resting; shall not they receive from us those honours
which their virtuous lives and hoary heads demand?
  So vast are the objects of research in the circle of
Medical Science,  that it has been found convenient to
divide them into  many  branches;  and though  indivi-
duals have devoted their whole lives to the investigation
of a single branch, they have had but too often to lament
the  limited nature  of  their researches,  compared with
the boundless extent of the subject.  With such  objects
before you, Gentlemen,  need 1 urge on you the neces-
sity of a life of close and unremitted study?  Without
a settled and steady plan, without a sacred devotion of
some part of your time to mental improvement, you will
soon sink into mere  routinists, and will lose that ardent
thirst for investigation and research by which you are
bow distinguished,  and which designates the character
of every enlightened physician.
  Medical Science, Gentlemen, is  progressive.  Im-
provements are daily coming to light, and unless you
keep pace with the general advance, in a few years you
will  be  left behind.  This remark  will  apply  more
particularly to those of you who are destined to exer-
cise  your profession in  the country, where intercourse 
9
 with other practitioners is rarely to be enjoyed.  Keep
 up, Gentlemen, with the profession.  I would say more
 —strive to stand at the head of it—toil to be one of the
 leaders in the glorious march.
   At the  present moment, it is strongly impressed on
 the minds of most medical men that new light is about
 to break forth on our  science.  The singular develope-
 ment of the-anatomical structure of the brain, which has
 been the result of recent investigation, and the wonder-
 ful similarity, I had almost said identity, that has been
 proved to exist between the nervous and galvanic fluids,
 seem to authorize the  anticipation.
   Never shall I forget seeing  the tear drop from  the
 eye of the venerated  Wistar, as he  exhibited to  his
 class the convolutions of the brain, and confessed  his
 inability to unfold them. With what joy would he have
 received the light that  has since then been shed abroad!
 with what rapture would he have unfolded the convo-
 luted mass in the crowded amphitheatre!
   A glorious morning is  approaching! Which of  us
 shall be its harbinger?  Is not this a noble theme for
 your ambition ?—what stronger incentive to your studies
 can  I offer you!
   When  a boy,  Themistocles  wandered  about the
 streets by  night.  When asked why he did so,  he an-
 swered, " The trophies  of Miltiades disturb  my slum-
 bers."  Will  you ignobly  yield to the sleep of apathy
 and indolence when trophies and laurels are to be won!
 —when your exertions in  the cause of humanity may
 be so nobly rewarded!
   A  debasing and degrading idea is  entertained  by
 some portions  of the  community, and even by some
members of the profession itself, against which 1 feel
           2 
10
 it a solemn duty to warn you.  Regarding medicine as
 a trade,  he is supposed to know most of his profession
 who knows least, of other things.  This idea is founded
 on a very limited view of the extent of Medical Science.
 Every branch of knowledge is reudered  tributary to
 the exercise of his profession by the enlightened prac-
 tioner, and I  would reject with the utmost disdain any
 attempt to  put limits to a physician's acquirements.
   To your care is committed  the charge of Science in
 general.  The history of the successive ages of man-
 kind exhibits the fact,  that by the medical profession
 have the  sciences uniformly been fostered;  under its
 care have  they been  cultivated and disseminated, and
 by the common consent of society it is considered their
 natural protector.
   To the poor, be kind, attentive, and compassionate.
 They are your best patients.   A faithful attendance on
 them will be  amply rewarded in this  life, and in that
 which  is to come.
   You will be entrusted by your patients with  what
 they hold most dear, the honour and reputation of their
 families.  You will be  continually called to witness
 scenes of domestic distress—of family difficulties; and
 while your ministry will often be effectual in composing
 differences, and in pouring the oil of consolation on the
 wounded spirit, never let what transpires pass beyond
 the sanctuary of your own bosom. Prudence, discretion
and secrecy,  are virtues of the highest order.  In  Ids
celebrated  oath,  Hippocrates  required  his pupils to
swear that  they would never reveal any domestic scene
 they might witness in the course of their practice
   If you are  thus to be trusted, if the veil of private
 life is thus to be elevated at your approach, have not 
11
your fellow-citizens a right to demand of you the most
rigid  morality,  uprightness of  heart,  and unsullied
character?
  You have this day been decorated with the uniform
of the profession; strive, I beseech you, as you value
its respectability, to keep your garments pure and un-
spotted.
  Nor would  I  press less earnestly upon you a reve-
rent and habitual  respect for  the dictates of our holy
religiou.  A system that inculcates peace on earth and
good will towards men, is peculiarly suited to the feel-
ings and wants of the medical practitioner.   Let your
lives  and habits put to blush the effrontery of wicked
men, who would lay the charge of infidelity at the door
of our profession.
   The moment of separation has arrived.  That inter-
course, which has  so long and so happily subsisted
between us, is at an end.  From this period, our paths
lead in different directions.  May your course be happy
and prosperous ! may your noble exertions in the cause
of humanity be crowned with the most glorious success !
   Go then, Gentlemen !  bear with you the most ardent
wishes of your teachers; and though, in all probability,
we shall never  again be assembled together on earth,
may we meet in  that world  where  sorrow,  sickness,
and pain are never known. 
/ 
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