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hilip’s ideas of the life of medical students, like those of
Pthe public at large, were founded on the pictures which
Charles Dickens drew in the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury. He soon discovered that Bob Sawyer, if he ever existed,
was no longer at all like the medical student of the present.
It is a mixed lot which enters upon the medical profes-
sion, and naturally there are some who are lazy and reckless.
They think it is an easy life, idle away a couple of years; and
then, because their funds come to an end or because an-
gry parents refuse any longer to support them, drift away
from the hospital. Others find the examinations too hard
for them; one failure after another robs them of their nerve;
and, panic-stricken, they forget as soon as they come into
the forbidding buildings of the Conjoint Board the knowl-
edge which before they had so pat. They remain year after
year, objects of good-humoured scorn to younger men:
some of them crawl through the examination of the Apoth-
ecaries Hall; others become non-qualified assistants, a
precarious position in which they are at the mercy of their
employer; their lot is poverty, drunkenness, and Heaven
only knows their end. But for the most part medical stu-
dents are industrious young men of the middle-class with
a sufficient allowance to live in the respectable fashion they
have been used to; many are the sons of doctors who have

0 Of Human Bondage