Hitherto I have dealt most with the intellectual outfit needed for the best practice of medicine, but the criticism I have just made brings me on more delicate ground. The man who feels himself so competent that his self-esteem forbids him to seek advice when he knows and must know he has come to the end of his reasonable resources, lacks the humility which belongs to larger natures, and he, too, is a man to avoid.
Be sure that the physician cannot he a mere intellectual machine. None know that better than we. Through all ages we have insisted that he shall feel himself bound by a code of moral law, to which, on the whole, he has held without question, while creeds of more serious nature were shifting and changing. What the Greek fathers of medicine asked of him we still ask of him to-day. He must guard the secrets wrung from you on the rack of disease. He is more often than he likes a confessor, and while the priest hears, as I have once said, the sins and foibles of to-day, he is as like as not to have to hear the story of a life. He must be what About calls him, "Le tombeau des secrets,"--the grave of secrets. How can he be too prudent or too close-mouthed? Honor you must ask of him, for you must feel free to speak. Charity you should expect from him, for the heart is open to him as it is to no other, and knowledge, large knowledge, is the food which nourishes charity in the tender-hearted. In the tender-hearted? How can he be that? All his days he has walked amidst misery, anguish, bodily and mental suffering. Be careful when you come to test him by his ability to feel what you call sympathy. In its loftiest meaning this is the capacity to enter into, to realize, and hence to feel with and for you. There is a mystery about this matter. I know men who have never suffered gravely in mind or body, who yet have some dramatic power to enter into the griefs of others, and to comprehend, as if by intuition, just what others feel, and hence how best to say and do the things which heal or help. I know others, seemingly as tender, who, with sad experience to aid them, appear to lack the imaginative insight needed to make their education in sorrow of use to their fellows. There are times when all that men can give of sympathetic tenderness is of use. There are others when what you crave is but the outcome of morbid desires for some form of interested attention. You may ask too much, and every doctor knows how curiously this persistent claim for what you call sympathy does, as the nurses say, "take it out of a doctor." The selfishness of nervous women sometimes exceeds belief in its capacity to claim pity and constancy of expressed sympathy.