Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II POET AND DOCTOR MY LIFE as a medical student in Amsterdam, which I have already briefly mentioned, brought me my first thoroughly disillusionizing and heart-breaking impressions. Often there comes back to my memory, and more vividly and painfully also in my dreams, the sensation I felt when entering for the first time the dissecting room. Think of the feelings of a romantic boy with a tender character and an imagination constantly wrapped up in the beauties of wild nature, of flowers and birds and butterflies — when he comes into a low, bare room filled with a slight haze of tobacco smoke, oppressive with smells of carbolic acid and putrefying flesh—where on black tables, the ghastly remnants of what once were men were visible in vague and horrid confusion — while an apparently unconcerned crowd of young men in long, blood- soiled robes were busily active, chattering and sometimes loudly laughing, like workmen interested in a wonted but not unpleasant task. I did not want to be sentimental, however. I did not swoon, or grow pale, or shudder, or turn sick, as I have seen the newcomers do. I always could control my nerves fairly well, and I felt bound to take all this stoically, looking at it from the lofty viewpoint of the philosopher. Yet the impression must have been deep and terrible, for its horror never left me until this day. On the fresh and tender soul of a boy of eighteen, hungry for beauty and poetry, this gruesome aspect of what human beauty becomes in the end is like a heavy blow. The shock left a deep scar on my soul. We moderns are no Greeks — and Dutchmen least of all. The glories of the well-shaped human body are not a daily sight and constant joy for us. In this awful place, while my imagination was still pure and untouched, I saw for the fir... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.