Letters to Physicians and Ministers

The Blessing of Labor

Sunnyside, Cooranbong, N. S. W.,

Australia, July, 1900.

To a Medical Student:

My Dear Brother, SpTB01 28.1

You asked me at one time what I thought in regard to your becoming a physician. I am instructed to say to you that the most useful lessons for you to learn at the present time will not be found in a medical course. Your mind needs to be trained to penetrate deeper and to take a more practical turn. If you had connected with one of our health institutions, if you had begun at the beginning by taking a nurse's course, doing hard, acceptable work in caring for the sick, it would have been the best education you could have obtained. SpTB01 28.2

Ministers and physicians should understand their own building, the body. They should learn how to use and develop their capabilities. They should see the need of learning how to use every part of the human machinery, how to give solidity to the muscles by employing them in taxing, useful labor. Young men who do not think deeply enough to take in the situation, who do not reason from cause to effect, will never have success as physicians. The love of ease, and, I may say, of physical laziness, unfits a man to be a physician or a minister. Those who are preparing to enter the medical work or the ministry should train brain, bone, and muscle to do hard work; then they can do hard thinking. SpTB01 28.3