in saying “I hope that it will please God yet to give you twenty years,” or, “You have a long life of activity before you.”  How often we see at the end of biographies or of cases recorded in medical papers, “after a long illness A. died rather suddenly,” or, “unexpectedly both to himself and to others.”  “Unexpectedly” to others, perhaps, who did not see, because they did not look; but by no means “unexpectedly to himself,” as I feel entitled to believe, both from the internal evidence in such stories, and from watching similar cases:  there was every reason to expect that A. would die, and he knew it; but he found it useless to insist upon his own knowledge to his friends.

In these remarks I am alluding neither to acute cases which terminate rapidly nor to “nervous” cases.

By the first much interest in their own danger is very rarely felt.  In writings of fiction, whether novels or biographies, these death-beds are generally depicted as almost seraphic in lucidity of intelligence.  Sadly large has been my experience in death-beds, and I can only say that I have seldom or never seen such.  Indifference, excepting with regard to bodily suffering, or to some duty the dying man desires to perform, is the far more usual state.

The “nervous case,” on the other hand, delights in figuring to himself and others a fictitious danger.

But the long chronic case, who knows too well himself, and who has been told by his physician that he will never enter active life again, who feels that every month he has to give up something he could do the month before—­oh! spare such sufferers your chattering hopes.  You do not know how you worry and weary them.  Such real sufferers cannot bear to talk of themselves, still less to hope for what they cannot at all expect.

So also as to all the advice showered so profusely upon such sick, to leave off some occupation, to try some other doctor, some other house, climate, pill, powder, or specific; I say nothing of the inconsistency—­for these advisers are sure to be the same persons who exhorted the sick man not to believe his own doctor’s prognostics, because “doctors are always mistaken,” but to believe some other doctor, because “this doctor is always right.”  Sure also are these advisers to be the persons to bring the sick man fresh occupation, while exhorting him to leave his own.

[Sidenote:  Wonderful presumption of the advisers of the sick.]

Wonderful is the face with which friends, lay and medical, will come in and worry the patient with recommendations to do something or other, having just as little knowledge as to its being feasible, or even safe for him, as if they were to recommend a man to take exercise, not knowing he had broken his leg.  What would the friend say, if he were the medical attendant, and if the patient, because some other friend had come in, because somebody, anybody, nobody, had recommended something, anything, nothing, were to disregard his orders, and take that other body’s recommendation?  But people never think of this.