It is a severe trial to the feelings of the humane physician to see valuable lives sacrificed to a blind trust in ignorance and unskilfulness. He is occasionally obliged to witness such a sacrifice, and ordinarily under such circumstances that any interference on his part would do no good, however strangely he may be urged to it by the dictates of humanity. If he utter the warning voice, however clear the case may be, it will be ascribed to interested and unworthy motives. He may feel deeply for the poor sufferer who is to be sacrificed, and for the family who are to be thus bereaved by the ruthless hand of unskilful ignorance; but hard as it is to hold his peace, he in most cases feels that he must do it, because if he do otherwise, he will not only spend his breath in vain, but will add to the evil by his ineffectual opposition. The many sad scenes in which the physician is obliged to mingle must often make him sorrowful, if he has not suffered his feelings and sympathies to be destroyed by a total dereliction of principle. As he watches with earnestness the struggle which occurs in severe cases between life and death for the mastery, and does what he can to give it a favorable issue, how deep is his anxiety, how painful the sense of his responsibility, what balancings of hope and fear does he experience; and then when the dread moment comes, when after all this pressure and conflict of feeling, the physician becomes persuaded that the issue is certain to be fatal, how is his spirit borne down with the burden of his grief! And then, too, there are cases, in which, though he has from the first had strong hopes of a favorable termination, all at once a train of symptoms arises, threatening immediate destruction. And to add to the painfulness of the case, perhaps the friends of the patient have not perceived the change, so secret has it been. As he goes to make his usual daily visit, cheered with the expectation of finding his patient better, he is overwhelmed with surprise when he sees, as he enters the sick chamber, that death is rapidly and surely doing its work. Besides seeing his own hope extinguished in a moment, he feels an unutterable pang in the necessity, thus suddenly pressing upon him, of destroying the hopes of the fond friends by whom the patient is surrounded.