But the man of our story was a true man, not a nineteenth century sham; he had his enthusiasms and was not ashamed of them, was a sentimentalist if you will, and was proud of the title. He had an idea that no good had ever been wrought in this world except by enthusiasts and sentimentalists. He felt that sentiment was thought sublimed, and enthusiasm the holy fire that exalted it; his prayer was to be classed with the band of workers who had helped their world; and when he decided to enter the portals of a great hospital, it was not to make his account with fame, to exploit the poor and suffering for his own advancement, but just simply to have the satisfaction day by day of having, by even ever so little, diminished the awful sum of human misery. It was a perfectly contemptible ideal, an absurdly insufficient goal to nineteen-twentieths of the men who that day had enrolled their names in the books of the hospitals of the kingdom; but it was just simply _his_ ideal and _his_ goal, and he thought no other profession would help him to attain these like medicine. "The parson," he used to say, "sees men at their best, the lawyer at their worst, but the doctor as they are. I will be a doctor." Now of all things which Elsworth was not, least was he a prig; so that he had no idea of the very unusual nature of the impetus that was driving him on a medical career. He thought, in his ingenuous way, that such impulses moved his fellow-aspirants. This sentiment was to be modified.
In what a world he found himself! He had several friends on the staff, and some half-dozen of his fellow-students were more or less known to him; but to what others was he introduced! In a couple of hundred young men one looks for variety, one expects that some will be heedless, vain, indolent, or vicious, while others are earnest, industrious, and true. But who were these men he saw to-day, and how came they to adopt the sacred ministry of healing, the work of the great Physician Himself?
Rough, rowdy, vulgar, and decidedly unintellectual as many of them appeared, with all the characteristics of the fast man about town, the profession they had chosen to follow seemed likely to suffer at their hands, if these men were fair samples. It has long been the habit of society to view with great leniency the peculiarly Bohemian manners and customs of medical students. The very term has become the symbol for rollicking rowdyism that would be tolerated in no other class. Their boisterous mirth, rude violence, and disregard of the ordinary proprieties of civilized existence have become recognised as their appropriate conduct, partly no doubt because their lugubrious occupation at the schools needs relaxation of a pronounced kind, and especially perhaps that as they must when in actual practice become the gravest and most "respectable" of men, it must be permitted to them to compress into their student life the follies, the riotousness, and the highly flavoured pleasures that must suffice for the rest of their mundane existence.