e 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 worr