This mystery of pain is still for me the saddest of earth’s disabilities.  After all is said that can be said on its values as a safeguard, an indicator of the locality of disease, after the moralist has considered it from the disciplinary view, and the theologian cracked his teeth on this bitter nut, and the evolutionist accounted for its existence, it comes at last to the doctor to say what shall be done with it.  I wish it came to him alone.  Civilized man has ceased to torture, but nature, relentless still, has in store possibilities of utmost anguish, which seem to fall alike on the guilty and the innocent, the poor and the rich, and in largest proportion on the gentler sex.  But while pain is still here with its ever-ready presence, the direct means of lessening it have multiplied so that hardly a month goes by without some new method being added of destroying for a time the power to suffer.  For, bear in mind that it is not usually the cause which can be at once destroyed by drugs, but only the bodily capacity to react to it in the fashion we call pain.  Ether, chloroform, cocaine, and many other drugs enable us to-day to feel sure that the mass of real pain in the world is vastly less than it was.  It is, indeed, possible to prevent all pain, and pain has no real value which we need respect and desire to preserve; at least this is so from the physician’s stand-point.

The temptation which comes to us out of the accumulation of anaesthetic agents is one which every tender-hearted man can understand.  The temptations which it presents to the suffering they only know who have suffered.  To this all that I have said leads up.  To most women, even to strong women, there comes a time when pain is a grim presence in their lives.  If brief, the wise physician calls upon them for that endurance, of the value of which I have spoken.  On some he calls in vain.  Even if it recur at intervals, as in the shape of neuralgic headaches, in the name of reason let him be the sole judge of your need to be relieved by drugs.  He well knows, as you cannot know, that the frequent use of morphia seems in the end to increase, not to lessen, the whole amount of probable future pain, and that what eases for a time is a devil in angelic disguise.  If you are urgent, weak of will, unable through unrestraint to comprehend him, the fault will be only half his, if you plead too eagerly for help and too constantly claim the relief he holds.

But suppose that the woman I address is a long and true sufferer, and that the physician desires to use such help often, then comes her time of peril and his day of largest responsibility.  If he be weak, or too tender, or too prone to escape trouble by the easy help of some pain-lulling agent, she is soon on the evil path of the opium, chloral, or chloroform habit.  Nor is prevention easy.  With constant or inconstant suffering comes weakness of mind as well as body, and none but the strongest natures pass through this ordeal of character unhurt.  If the woman be unenduring and unthoughtful, if the doctor fail to command her faith, and be too sympathetic, at last she gets possession herself of the drug, or the drug and the hypodermatic needle.  Then there is before her one of the saddest of the many downward paths which lead to destruction of body and soul.