The flippant or superficial person may at once reply: Our object is to gain money and pursue a remunerative calling by looking after sick people. Women find so much difficulty in honestly supporting themselves, that it is reason enough that they can in this way do so, and the labourer is worthy of his hire. But I say emphatically that anyone who makes pecuniary gain the chief motive for entering upon a medical career is an unworthy student; he is not fit to become a doctor, and he will be a labourer not worthy of his hire. What should be thought of a statesman who aspired to the direction of national affairs on account of the salary of £10,000? The nobleness of motive must enlarge with the nobleness of occupation, or the unworthy occupier sinks to a degradation measured by the height to which his career should have raised him. Now, there is no career nobler than that of the physician. The progress and welfare of society is more intimately bound up with the prevailing tone and influence of the medical profession than with the status of any other class of men. This exceptional influence is not only due to the great importance of dealing with the issues of life and death in health and disease, but it is still more owing to the fact that the body and the mind are so inseparably blended in the human constitution, that we cannot deal with one portion of this compound nature without in more or less degree affecting the other. Our ministrations to body and soul cannot be separated by a sharply-defined line. The arbitrary distinction between the physician of the body and the physician of the soul--doctor and priest--tends to disappear as science advances. Every branch of medicine involves moral considerations, both as regards the practitioner and the patient. Even the amputation of a limb, the care of a case of fever, the birth of a child, all contain a moral element which is evident to the clear understanding, and which cannot be neglected without injury to the doctor, to the individual, and to society. But probably it will be generally agreed that the hope of gaining money must not be the primary motive for choosing a medical career; but that interest in the line of study and kind of life, with a perception of the wide and beneficent influence which it can exert, should form the determining motive for becoming a physician. If, then, we recognise that, although just reward for honest labour is fair, we must not enter upon medicine as a trade for getting money, but from a higher motive, this motive, as it influences conduct, becomes on that account a moral motive or an ideal which should guide our future practical life as physicians. Now, this ideal necessitates a distinct conception of what is right or wrong for us, in medicine, both as human beings and as women. Simply sensuous life, without an ideal or without higher principles of action than the limited needs of every day, tends to degrade the individual and all who surround him.