It is a very peculiar thing that during the past ten years there has appeared among some of the best of the medical students a resolution not to practise medicine after graduation, though that is the only way by which a medical man can gain a livelihood; at the first opportunity they give up medicine for some of its subsidiary sciences,—physiology, chemistry, or something of the sort. And every one of these young men knows that if they practised until they were thirty years old, they might gain a reputation; at thirty-five, a competency for life; and at forty-five, wealth.
But they argue in a different way: You see, don't you, that medicine is in such a state of infancy that one should not as yet try to cure, but to collect the materials; so that the doctors of the future may know how to cure. And here for the advantage of the well-beloved science—they are great hands to curse medicine; but, nevertheless, they are devoting all their energies for its advantage—they refuse riches, they refuse pleasure, for the sake of sitting in the hospitals, and they are making, don't you know, observations that are interesting to science: they cut up frogs; they dissect a hundred subjects every year; and at the first chance they establish chemical laboratories. With what severity they follow out this lofty resolution depends, of course, on the way in which their domestic life is established. If it is not necessary for those dependent upon them, they do not even begin to practise, and they are willing to live almost in poverty; but if their domestic circumstances compel them to do so, they practise, but only just so long as it is necessary to, for their family; that is, on a very limited scale, and they cure only those people who are really sick, and who can really be cured by the present pitiful state of the science; that is, the sick who bring them no advantage at all. To this class Lopukhóf and Kirsánof belonged. They expected to graduate this year, and they have announced that they will take, or, as they say at the medical school, "do," their examinations merely for the degree of M. D. They have both been hard at work on their medical theses, and they have made way with a huge quantity of frogs; both have adopted as a specialty the nervous system, and properly speaking they were working in co-operation; but for the formal dissertation the work was divided: one has gathered for his materials the facts that they both observed on one question, the other did the same thing for another.
