The people who really want to know if they will die of some given disease are few in number. Those who pretend they want to know are more common. Those who should not know are frequent enough, and among them one is troubled to do what seems right and to say in answer to their questions what is true.
Wise women choose their doctors and trust them. The wisest ask the fewest questions. The terrible patients are nervous women with long memories, who question much where answers are difficult, and who put together one's answers from time to time and torment themselves and the physician with the apparent inconsistencies they detect. Another form of trouble arises with the woman whose standards are of unearthly altitude. This is the woman who thinks herself deceived if she does not know what you are giving her, or who, if without telling her you substitute an innocent drug for a hurtful one which she may have learned to take too largely, thinks that you are untruthful in the use of such a method. And you would indeed be wrong if you were of opinion that to tell her the whole truth, and invite her to break the habit by her own act, were available means. I certainly do not think that you have any right (indeed, I would not even discuss this) to take active means to make her think she is taking, say opium, when you are only giving her something which tastes like it. If she asks, you must answer. But she may not, or does not, and yet when she is well again and learns that the physician preferred to act without her knowledge because he distrusted her power to help, she is very likely, if she chance to be a certain kind of woman, to say that he has been untruthful. Happily, such cases must be rare, and yet I know of some which have been the source of much annoyance to sensitive men. Thorough trust and full understanding is the way to avoid such difficulties. A nervous woman should be made to comprehend at the outset that the physician means to have his way unhampered by the subtle distinctions with which bedridden women are apt to trouble those who most desire to help them.
I omitted above an allusion to the most unpleasant inquirers, those who are either on the verge of insanity or are victims of that singular malady, hypochrondriasis. A patient clearly staggering to and fro on the border line of sanity consults you. Here is a wilful, terrified being, eager to know the truth. "Am I becoming insane? Will I end in an asylum?" How can you answer? You see clearly, are sure the worst is coming. What shall you do with this morbid, scared, obstinate child-man? You put aside his questions, but you have here a person quite or nearly sane to-day, resolute to hear, afraid to learn the truth he dreads. I leave my reader with this patient, and my stated knowledge and my shifted responsibility. "Doctor, if I am going to be insane, I will kill myself." Good reader, pray dispose of this case. Or take the ease of a confirmed hypochondriac. He is miserable, has a hundred ailments, watches the weather, studies the barometer, has queer delusions as to diets, clothes, and his own inability to walk. The least hint of a belief that he is not as well as he was a week ago, or even a too close examination, leaves him with a new malady, and he, too, is a sharp questioner. As a rule, he has no perceptible changes in his tissues. But if he has some real malady,--it may be a grave one on which he has built a larger sense of misery than there was need for, and the case is common enough,--how shall you answer him? It is a less difficult case than the other, and I gladly leave him also to my consultant reader's acquired knowledge and to his personal sense of the value of truth.