Thirdly. If the deception be discovered or suspected, the effect upon the patient is much worse than a frank and full statement of the truth can produce. If disagreeable news, for example, be concealed from him, there is very great danger that it will in some way be revealed to him so abruptly and unexpectedly, as to give him a severe shock, which can for the most part be avoided when the communication is made voluntarily. And then, too, the very fact that the truth has been withheld, increases, for obvious reasons, this shock. I will relate a case as an example. It occurred during the prevalence of an epidemic. A lady was taken sick and died. The fact of her death was studiously concealed from another lady of her acquaintance, who was liable to be attacked by the same disease. She was supposed by her to be doing well, until one day a child from a neighboring family accidentally alluded to the death of her friend in her presence. The shock which the sad news thus communicated produced upon her was almost overwhelming, and it was of course rendered more intense by the reflection, that her friends thought her to be exceedingly in danger of dying of the prevailing disease, and therefore had practised this concealment in order to quiet her apprehensions. She soon followed her friend, and it is not an improbable supposition, that the strong impression thus made upon her mind had some agency in causing her death. In another case of a similar character, the first intimation which a lady had of the death of a friend was from seeing the husband of this friend pass in the street with a badge of mourning. She was immediately prostrated upon her bed, and was a long time in recovering from the shock. In both of these cases the concealment of the truth was prompted by the best of motives—pure kindness; and yet nothing is more plain than that it was a _mistaken_ kindness. Whatever may be true in other instances, the result showed this to be the fact in these two cases. And if it be true, as I think all experience will prove, that success, and not failure, in the attempt at concealment, is the exception to the general fact, it clearly follows that deception is impolitic as a measure of kindness, and therefore, aside from any other consideration, it should be wholly discarded in our intercourse with the sick. I have a case in mind, which exhibits in contrast the influence of frankness and of deception.