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. Be this as it may, it is certain that from the patient in the hospital ward to the magistrate on the bench, conduct that would be considered in other men as intolerable and worthy of the severest punishment is in their case lightly passed over. On the part of the public at large, and on behalf of the men themselves, this is a great error, and has its foundation in a wrong conception, both of the work the students have to do and the sort of relaxation it requires. On behalf of the suffering humanity soon to become dependant upon such men for their help in sickness, a revolution in such a false system of education is no less urgently demanded. Unpleasant as the work of the dissecting, _post-mortem_ rooms, and hospital wards, may seem to the outside world, its daily recurrence makes it so familiar to all engaged in it that it very soon ceases to be any more unpleasant than many other occupations. The men who take real interest in their work very speedily forget or do not recognise any of its disagreeables, while those who do not acquire this real interest in their occupation become mere hangers-on at the schools, and grow rowdy for want of better employment. The _real_ students, with their hearts in business, do not seek or take such methods of unbending the bow; for the rest it should not be permitted them to insult their noble calling by behaviour that would disgrace savages in unexplored tracts of equatorial Africa. The sooner a more common-sense theory of medical student life is adopted by the public, the better for the world and the men themselves. Young Elsworth, then, was not altogether pleased with what he saw of his future companions, and it took him but a short time after his entry at the schools to see that not more than half of the men by whom he was surrounded would be for him even tolerable class mates.