I often wonder whether, when people go round a hospital and see the rows of white beds and clean patients, and everything neat and tidy, they think the patients arrive here looking like that. Very often in the wards, when the porters have carried up an accident case on the stretcher, I have hardly known how to get the man's dirty clothes off, and it takes time before you can get them reasonably clean; but in the wards you always receive a note or a message by the porter from the house surgeon, with a rough diagnosis of what the case is, so that you know which limb to be especially careful in moving. But it is different when you receive a patient in the front surgery; the policemen tramp in and deposit the stretcher on the floor, and there is much mopping of their foreheads before they tell you roughly what they know of the accident, and then you have to proceed to find out for yourself what is the extent of the injury, and often the patient is quite unconscious, so he cannot help you at all. I think at first I had a dim notion that every case that was carried in on a stretcher was sure to be admitted to the wards, but one soon learns that a good many of these cases are more frightened than hurt, and after a little rest and a thorough overhaul by the house surgeon they are able to go home again; on the other hand, every now and then a man who has had a very serious accident will manage to walk up to the hospital, and he may even sit down amongst the other waiting patients and quietly wait his turn to be seen, unless you happen to be on the look-out, and note that he is looking ill, and get him on to a couch for immediate attention. There is generally plenty doing in the front surgery, and whenever any of the men have nothing better to do they stroll in to see what is going on, so one hears all the gossip of the place; very quaint, too, are the tales the patients tell of their symptoms. I am not good at remembering these things, but there was one old lady who said the doctor told her that she had "the brownkitis, and that all her tubs (tubes) were full up."