Sometimes, it is true, sad cases occur which cast a gloom over the path of the physician; but then the gloom is soon dissipated by the successful issue of other cases which he had reason to fear would have a fatal termination. Sometimes, too, unfortunate cases come in clusters, and the physician is for the time obliged to see so much of suffering and death, and the sorrows of bereavement, that in his sadness he is ready to regret that he ever adopted such a profession. But this happens only occasionally. It is a mere coincidence, and it is but momentary. Events soon take their ordinary current, and he has his usual amount of success, and resumes his wonted air of cheerfulness and hope. The results of the skilful and judicious practice of medicine are such then as to make hope, and not despondency, to characterize the prevailing cast of the physician’s mind. And so it should be. For hope stimulates to action—steady, clear-minded action—while despondency is prone to inaction, and leads to no efforts except those which are hurried, fitful and confused. I do not mean that the physician should in any case blind himself to the dangers which it presents, and let a vain hope lull him into security. This error should be as carefully avoided as the opposite one, committed by those who see difficulty and danger in almost every case, magnifying every bad symptom, and imagining some which have no existence. The hope of the physician should be an intelligent hope. It should be based upon just and definite conclusions. It should be discriminating, and should be varied in its degree according to the character of each individual case. Every medicine that is given should be administered by the hand of hope. The prospect, at least of relief, and generally of recovery, should be held up to the mind of the patient. Remedies should be given to effect some definite object, and the physician should hope to a greater or less degree that they will do so. Hope may thus be indulged in relation to the different stages of a case, without regard to the final event of it, which may be so distant and so clouded in doubt that no calculations can be made in regard to it. And the physician may direct the attention of the patient to these same points, and thus give variety to the hope which he excites in his mind. This in many cases is much better than to come to him every day with the simple expression of the hope that he will at length recover. In the tedium of his confinement, if it be a long one, he soon tires of looking far ahead to the bright fields of convalescence, but finds relief in the little spots lighted up of hope by the way—the oases thus made in the desert of sickness.