The physician should exhaust every means known to medical science to prevent his patient from knowing what it is that eases pain when his practice makes it absolutely necessary that a substance of the sort should be administered, and this is very much less frequent than the average doctor realizes, as will be shown in another passage of this book. It is in this necessity for concealment that the great danger of using the hypodermic syringe as an administrating instrument principally lies. The moment the hypodermic syringe is taken from the doctor's or the nurse's kit, the sufferer is made aware of the means which will be used to give him ease. He remembers it, forming a respect and admiration, almost an affection, for the mere instrument, and with the most intense interest gathers such information as he may find it possible to acquire about this wonder-working little tool and the material which is its ammunition of relief. He knows absolutely that the relief which he has found is not due to medical skill, but to the potency of a special drug administered in a special way. He stops guessing as to whether he has been soothed by an opiate; he knows he has been. It is not only those of weak psychology or mental characteristics who are affected by this knowledge and who through it become drug-takers, though it is the general impression that this is the case. No impression was ever more inaccurate. The mentally strong and the morally lofty are as much averse to suffering physical pain as the mentally weak and the morally degenerate. All are in the same class when the drug has been administered until that point of tolerance is reached where its administration cannot be neglected without the indignant protest of the physical body. That this fact should be impressed upon the medical profession as a whole is one of the most needful things I know.