Most doctors have their share, and more, of illness, and are not, as I
have seen stated, exempt from falling a prey to contagious maladies.
Indeed, our records sadly show that this is not the case. Perhaps there
is value for them and their future patients in the fact that they have
been in turn patient and doctor and have served in both camps. Like
other sick folks, the physician, as I know, looks forward, when ill, to
the "morning visits" quite as anxiously as do any of those who have at
times awaited his own coming.

That medical poet who has the joyous art of sending a ripple of mirth
across the faces of the Anglo-Saxon world recognizes this fact in a
cheerful poem, called "The Morning Visit," and to which I gladly refer
any of my readers who would like to know from the lips of Oliver Wendell
Holmes what manner of delightful patient he must have been. I can fancy
that he lost for his doctor many a pleasant hour.

It has seemed to me as if this wonderful remaking and regrowing of the
tissues might be likened to a swift change from the weak childhood of
disease to a sudden manhood of mind and body, in which is something of
mysterious development elsewhere unmatched in life. Death has been
minutely busy with your tissues, and millions of dead molecules are
being restored in such better condition that not only are you become new
in the best sense,--renewed, as we say,--but have gotten power to grow
again, and, after your terrible typhoid or yellow fever, may win a
half-inch or so in the next six months,--a doubtful advantage for some
of us, but a curious and sure sign of great integral change.

The Greeks had a notion that once in seven years we are totally changed,
the man of seven years back having in this time undergone an entire