NATURAL SCIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY. 711 



course of sfudy, (for the true physician is a student to the end of the chapter) an 

 examination of the borderland of your science ; the influence of psychic states 

 on physical conditions. I believe we are beginning to get some lights for that 

 shadowy realm, and that by those lights the reverent student will be able to walk 

 forward to many results that will greatly aid the practice of medicine. I have 

 observed that a good deal has been said lately of the importance of having medi- 

 cal students better prepared in general knowledge — especially in fundamental 

 natural science — before they begin the study of their profession. Thus they 

 would lengthen your course at the beginning of it. 



And I would lengthen it at the other end, where it reaches up into psycholo- 

 gy. For you are to doctor a man who has a soul of such dominant activity that 

 it often affects most profoundly and even commandingly that physical basis on 

 which your science is to work. 



That study is an obscure one, but it is one of rising importance; importance 

 both to the preacher and the doctor. To the preacher, for I must know what 

 checks and reactions my doctrines will meet when they impinge on a disordered 

 or cantankerous physical system. And to the doctor, for he must know what al- 

 lowance to make for those intangible and imponderable agencies, that like spirit 

 hands manipulate his drugs, now paralyzing their action and again intensifying it 

 beyond computation. 



Young gentlemen, you have a great profession, because it involves the care 

 of an immortal being from the ground up. You have not compassed it, when 

 you have found specifics in nature's pharmacy for the ills of the flesh. I think 

 specifics more and more retire from the advance of true science, because science 

 gets comprehensive, and every prescription must contemplate the entire man. If 

 you work away at this or that symptom without intelligent vision of all that being 

 which the symptoms inhere, you are only tinkering. So study the whole of that 

 being; sometimes to get at a man's physical condition it is as necessary to sound 

 his conscience as it is to tap- his lungs. " A bad heart" is a phrase that has two ■ 

 meanings. Those meanings may be related, and each be interesting to the phy- 

 sician. 



One word more as to those upper ranges of your profession. You and I are 

 servants of mankind. Victor Hugo somewhere says, " the priest's door should al- 

 ways be open, the doctor's door should never be shut." We cannot be true to our 

 calling and wall ourselves into our own pleasures or our own comfort. We are not in 

 the highest view scientists, we are not money makers, we are not ambition hunt- 

 ers. We are missionaries. A sort of divine obligation pushes us on. If we 

 realize the grandeur of our calling the world's praise or blame glides past us like 

 the idle winds. We have a ministry, and among bruised bodies and bruised 

 spirits we are as those who serve. Now to serve — not a principle, and not a creed, 

 and not a school, but a living and deathless being we need a certain poise of 

 character and tenderness of touch, which comes only from contact with calming 

 and ennobling spiritual virtue^;. Therefore you need not only to remember that 



VI-45 



