without feeling, even when a tide of emotion may be pressing his heart almost to bursting, because he knows that a valuable life is hanging upon those very exertions, which he is making with all the seeming coolness of indifference. I have said that the feeling of the physician vents itself in action. Before that action begins, his emotions are often oppressive, more so than those of the by-standers; for he knows all the difficulties and dangers of the case, and sees the very points which should excite anxiety. Watch him while preparing for a serious operation. Though he may appear to the careless observer perfectly cool and undisturbed, you may see in his unguarded moments a betrayal of the strong under-current of feeling, which he endeavors to conceal. The occasional sigh, followed perhaps by an incidental remark to a by-stander, as a diversion to his feelings, just as the boy whistles to destroy his fear, the compressed lips, the slightly trembling hand, as he busies himself in making his preparations, thus finding relief to the pressure of the excitement within by external acts, some of them perhaps needless—these and other signs show it. And these signs may appear up to the last moment of delay. But the instant he begins the operation, they are gone. The hand may tremble till the knife touches the flesh, and the blood begins to gush; and then it is firm, for his feelings have now found relief in _action_. Perhaps it will be said that there is conclusive evidence, that the tendency of the practice of medicine and surgery is to harden and destroy feeling, in the fact itself, that, when the physician comes to act, his natural sensibilities give place to the mere excitement attending the different steps of that action. In reply to this I say, that it is an error to suppose, that because feeling is relieved for the moment by diversion of the mind into another channel, it is of course hardened, or destroyed. Feeling may and does resume its hold when the action ceases; and, if the action ends in relief, it manifests itself in a different form—in a joyful and triumphant, in place of a sad and anxious sympathy. And this change in the character of the sympathy has a tendency to strengthen rather than lessen the natural sensibilities of the heart. He who has year after year sympathized with his patients in their sufferings, and then has rejoiced with them in their deliverance—a deliverance of which he has himself been instrumental—must be possessed both of a more deep, and a more active sympathy, than when he began his career of usefulness. This result is in consonance with the laws of our nature. While the mere sight of suffering, without any attempt to relieve it, often repeated, manifestly blunts the sensibilities, and hardens the heart; it is, on the other hand, the invariable effect of the effort to remove the distresses of our fellow men, to make our sensibilities more deep and more tender. Our interest in the effort, our joy in its