It is important, as I shall show more particularly in the next chapter, that the physician maintain his character for veracity and candor in his intercourse with his patients; else, when he can consistently utter the language of hope, it may prove no cordial, because his lips have so often uttered that language so falsely. There are cases in which death may seem to the patient and to his friends to be staring him in the face, and yet the physician may see a sure and speedy relief coming to all the alarming symptoms. Now when he gives an assurance to this effect, in order to quell the anxieties and fears of the sick man and his friends, if he has been known to be in the habit of giving similar assurances without any ground for them, he cannot expect to be believed. The views and feelings of patients, in regard to the expectation of a recovery, are often misunderstood by their friends. They are sometimes supposed to be wholly blind to their danger, when they are really fully aware of it. They perhaps speak occasionally of what they will do if they get well, and allude to the expected effect of remedies, as if they supposed that they would overcome the disease, and dwell, in their conversation with their friends and with the physician, upon the favorable symptoms that may appear. All this may, and often does, occur in cases in which death is almost certain to be the result; and yet it is entirely consistent with the existence in the mind of the patient of a rational view of his danger. I remember well a respected friend, who talked of hope and relief now and then almost to the last; and yet, from day to day, he was making such preparations, even to the framing of his will, as showed that, on the whole, he believed this to be his last sickness. We are not to confound these occasional expressions of hope, these fitful and momentary states of mind, with the settled conviction of the understanding often existing behind all this. The promptings of the natural desire for life are ordinarily not utterly destroyed by the sure prospect of death. There will be moments when this instinctive love of life, and of whatever in life has ministered to the happiness of the sufferer, will turn off his thoughts from the contemplation of death, and call up by association a thousand objects of endearment. “For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing, anxious being e’er resigned, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing, ling’ring look behind?”