The description of the night before the first operation is much to the point. The patient’s experience with the amateur hospital barber gives a vibrant touch of humor to the mystery of preparing for the operating room, which is so apt to develop into a hospital tradition even in the best of organizations; a mystery which is, as likely as not, to hinder the acquiring of a good morale by a patient. Mr. Harper discreetly leaves much to the imagination concerning the gruesome details of his stormy convalescence. But the oft-told tale of the normalcy and expected sequence of such events as a patient is supposed to experience and describe; the account of the bottles of castor oil he was obliged to consume; the tale of the nurse who “died” behind a screen in his room; the tale of the military rounds of hospital service which seem cold but which are necessary, and which really can have a soul hidden within them; the tale of the prognostic nurse who prophesied the death of the kidney patient in “Number 88;” the tale of the first removal of the surgical dressings after the operation; the tale of the visit of consolation (?) from the official head of a neighboring church, all lend vividness and color to the tragedy and the gaiety of what must have seemed to the author as “one thousand and one nights” of horror and mischance. But throughout the entire melange he seems never to have lost his sense of humor. Mr. Harper has seen fit to quote my first impressions when I commented on this book shortly after reading the privately printed first edition. I am correctly quoted, for I believe that every young graduate must secure an appreciation of the discomforts of illness if he is to be successful in making his patients comfortable during their sojourn in bed, and their subsequent convalescence. The art of every physician should include much more than a mere cure for his patient. There is no school like experience, and a personal accident or a febrile disease requiring a stay in bed will do more to educate a physician than all the books that have been printed, or than any service he may carry on in a hospital. The most engaging story of today is the hard luck medical story; and the human individual, especially among women, is so prone to recite his or her own, or the experience of others, that the ladies’ luncheon party in modern society has been well designated “an organ recital.” Mr. Harper enters only one complaint against a member of my profession, and that a justifiable one: his account of the first post-operative dressing should be told to every young medical student as a warning and a threat for them to avoid such a brutal performance. He refrains from telling us about the disagreeable offices of the hospital orderly, and of the painfully embarrassing moments of daily routine which led one patient of my acquaintance to greet every knock on his door with the challenge, “Who goes there? Friend or enema?”