I have heard it said that the art of healing makes men hard-hearted and indifferent to human suffering.  I am willing to own that there is often a professional hardness in surgeons, just as there is in theologians,—­only much less in degree than in these last.  It does not commonly improve the sympathies of a man to be in the habit of thrusting knives into his fellow-creatures and burning them with red-hot irons, any more than it improves them to hold the blinding-white cantery of Gehenna by its cool handle and score and crisp young souls with it until they are scorched into the belief of—­Transubstantiation or the Immaculate Conception.  And, to say the plain truth, I think there are a good many coarse people in both callings.  A delicate nature will not commonly choose a pursuit which implies the habitual infliction of suffering, so readily as some gentler office.  Yet, while I am writing this paragraph, there passes by my window, on his daily errand of duty, not seeing me, though I catch a glimpse of his manly features through the oval glass of his chaise, as he drives by, a surgeon of skill and standing, so friendly, so modest, so tenderhearted in all his ways, that, if he had not approved himself at once adroit and firm, one would have said he was of too kindly a mould to be the minister of pain, even if he were saving pain.

You may be sure that some men, even among those who have chosen the task of pruning their fellow-creatures, grow more and more thoughtful and truly compassionate in the midst of their cruel experience.  They become less nervous, but more sympathetic.  They have a truer sensibility for others’ pain, the more they study pain and disease in the light of science.  I have said this without claiming any special growth in humanity for myself, though I do hope I grow tenderer in my feelings as I grow older.  At any rate, this was not a time in which professional habits could keep down certain instincts of older date than these.

This poor little man’s appeal to my humanity against the supposed rapacity of Science, which he feared would have her “specimen,” if his ghost should walk restlessly a thousand years, waiting for his bones to be laid in the dust, touched my heart.  But I felt bound to speak cheerily.

—­We won’t die yet awhile, if we can help it,—­I said,—­and I trust we can help it.  But don’t be afraid; if I live longest, I will see that your resting place is kept sacred till the dandelions and buttercups blow over you.

He seemed to have got his wits together by this time, and to have a vague consciousness that he might have been saying more than he meant for anybody’s ears.—­I have been talking a little wild, Sir, eh? he said.—­There is a great buzzing in my head with those drops of yours, and I doubt if my tongue has not been a little looser than I would have it, Sir.  But I don’t much want to live, Sir; that’s the truth of the matter, and it does rather please me to think that fifty years