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.