A Great Modern Physician's Influence.--It is interesting to study in the lives of great physicians the details which illustrate their personal influence, their consciousness of it and how deliberately they used it. A typical example very close to us, whose reputation was still fresh while I was at the University of Paris, was Professor Charcot. He had made great discoveries in nervous pathology. To a great extent he had revolutionized our knowledge of nervous diseases and added many new chapters to this rather obscure department of medicine. Far from making the treatment of nervous diseases easier than before, or giving more assurance to the physician who dealt with them, his discoveries, however, had just the opposite effect. His work emphasized that practically all of the so-called nervous diseases were due to degenerations in the central nervous system, which no medicine could be expected to relieve in any way, and which nothing short of the impossible re-creation of damaged parts could ever cure. His studies included organic degenerations of other organs, and in his treatise on "Diseases of the Old" it is made clear that many of the symptoms of old age are due to organic lesions for which no cure can ever be expected. This would seem to discourage treatment, yet somehow Charcot became a great practicing physician as well as a medical scientist and pathologist. His success was due to his personal influence over his patients. In spite of the unfavorable prognosis that he had to give in so many cases, he was able by suggestion to help many patients with regard to their course of life, and to reassure them, so that many adventitious neurotic symptoms not due to their underlying nervous disease, but to their solicitude about themselves, disappeared. Very few people who came to him went away without feeling that his advice had been very valuable to them and without experiencing, as a rule, after they had followed his advice, that they were much better than they had been before. It was for the neurotic conditions associated with nervous affections that Charcot's personal influence over patients was of the greatest therapeutic significance.