success, our lamentation over its failure, the common cause which we make with the poor sufferer, tend to produce this effect. In this connection I will notice an error which is very common. Persons who are not accustomed to look at wounds, or witness scenes of sufferings, are apt when they do so to have certain effects produced upon the physical system, which are so well known, that I need not describe them. The error consists in supposing them to be evidences of feeling and sympathy, and the process of overcoming them to be necessarily a hardening process. They are effects produced in the nervous system, and have a mere incidental, and not an essential connection with the moral sensibilities. It is well known that all are not equally susceptible of these effects, and the degree of susceptibility is far from being an index of the degree of sympathy in each individual. I have known many men, who had little of true tenderness and kindness of feeling, faint away at the sight of blood, while others with hearts overflowing with tenderness, and a hand ever extended in active sympathy to the needy and suffering, under the same circumstances were entirely unaffected. The possession of this susceptibility has therefore no necessary relation, to the moral character. They who exhibit it are commonly spoken of as being ‘tender-hearted,’ and yet there is nothing in this quality which is inconsistent with the most wanton cruelty, or the most abandoned vice. Neither has this susceptibility any necessary relation to physical courage; much less to moral courage. Many, who possess it to a great degree, have nevertheless uncommon physical courage, so that though they would turn pale at the sight of a cut finger, they would face the cannon’s mouth without fear, and in the excitement of battle, the flow of blood and the groans of the wounded, would be unheeded. While on the contrary, there are many, who are unaffected by the sight of blood and suffering, in whom the idea of personal danger would at once blanch the face and make the knees to tremble. It is the conquest which the physician obtains over this nervous susceptibility, of which I have been speaking, that has given rise to the erroneous impression, that the practice of medicine and surgery necessarily subjects the heart to a hardening process. But you have seen, that while he is acquiring this self-control, his sympathy with suffering is becoming all the time deeper and livelier, by the exercise of that active benevolence to which his profession calls him. It is only the physician who refuses to yield to this call, and pursues his profession as a mere trade for self-aggrandizement, that blunts his sensibilities, and hardens his heart.