An awful fact about the emotional state produced by witnessing or hearing about the agonies of human beings or of sentient animals is that to some people (actually very few and diminishing in number among civilised races) it is distinctly a source of pleasure, though to most of us it is intolerably painful. This fact forms one of the most difficult problems of psychology. It seems that just as there are people who enjoy seeing dangerous acrobatic performances or climbing themselves among ice and rocks at the risk of their lives, or reading of hairbreadth escapes, of bloody murders, of ghosts, and other horrors--all of which are repulsive to the majority--so there are some people who experience delicious shudderings--“des frissons exquis”--when they see a man or an animal in torture or read a description of such things. In the eighteenth century it was not unusual for a country cousin on a visit to London to be taken as a treat to see half a dozen men and boys hanged at Newgate, and then to complete the happy day by a visit to Bedlam to see the madmen flogged! Fortunately, public opinion and education seem to have been able actually to alter the operation of the emotions excited by these brutalities--so that to-day practically everyone in the Western States of Europe regards the unnecessary infliction of pain with horror and indignation, and is anxious to avoid witnessing pain, even in cases where it is a necessary evil. It is a mistake to suppose that there is any tendency on the part of scientific men or medical men to be callous or indifferent to the infliction of pain. The surgeon sometimes has to inflict pain in order to prevent greater future pain or death--but he is not indifferent to the pain he causes. He is not even “cruel only to be kind”--but appears cruel to the unthinking because he has to give pain which he knows will save his patient from far greater pain, and he has to maintain a calm and determined attitude in order to help those around him to exercise self-control. The medical art is, above all things, an art of removing and abolishing pain, and its practitioners are all the more sensitive concerning pain because they know more and see more of it than other people, and make it their chief business to alleviate suffering.