Here was the beginning of my success. Whatever time may remain to
me, to-day in a sense my life is finished. I am a broken-hearted and
discomfited man, with little more to fear and nothing to hope. Therefore
I may be believed when I say that in these pages I set down the truth
and nothing but the truth, not attempting to palliate my conduct where
it has been wrong, nor to praise myself even when praise may have been
due. Perhaps, then, it will not be counted conceit when I write that
in my best days I was really a master of my trade. To my faculty for
diagnosis I have, I think, alluded; it amounted to a gift--a touch
or two of my fingers would often tell me what other doctors could
not discover by prolonged examination. To this I added a considerable
mastery of the details of my profession, and a sympathetic insight into
character, which enabled me to apply my knowledge to the best advantage.

When a patient came to me and told me that his symptoms were this
or that or the other, I began by studying the man and forming my own
conclusions as to his temperament, character, and probable past. It
was this method of mine of studying the individual as a whole and his
ailment as something springing from and natural to his physical and
spiritual entity that, so far as general principles can be applied to
particular instances, often gave me a grip of the evil, and enabled
me, by dealing with the generating cause, to strike at its immediate
manifestation. My axiom was that in the human subject mind is king; the
mind commands, the body obeys. From this follows the corollary that the
really great doctor, however trivial the complaint, should always begin
by trying to understand the mind of his patient, to follow the course of
its workings, and estimate their results upon his physical nature.

Necessarily there are many cases to which this rule does not seem to
apply, those of contagious sickness, for instance, or those of surgery,