“That’s the way it happened. My patient grew worse and worse. You, my friend, are not a physician; therefore, it is hard for you to understand just what the young doctor experiences in his soul when he begins to suspect that the disease is mastering him. Where is his self-confidence then? Your courage simply oozes out of you; words can’t describe it. A notion takes possession of you that you have forgotten all you ever knew, that the patient has lost faith in you, and that the others are beginning to notice your bewilderment and to report new symptoms to you reluctantly; they glance at you from under their eyebrows, they whisper among themselves.... How mortifying! There should be some medicine, you permit yourself to think, to counteract this disease--if you only knew which one! Perhaps that’s the one. You try it--no, that’s not it! You haven’t given the mixture sufficient time to work ... and you try another. Or you turn the pages of your pharmacopœia ... thinking you might hit upon something.... In the meantime a person is dying; another doctor might have saved him. A consultation is necessary, you argue to yourself; you don’t feel like taking the entire responsibility. What a fool you are made to look, under the circumstances! After a time, of course, you get used to it. A person dies--well, it isn’t your fault, you have done everything according to rules. It is even more painful when the relatives show blind faith in you, while in your own heart you know you are unable to help. “It was such a faith that the family of Alexandra Andreyevna exhibited towards me, forgetting that the daughter was in danger. I too, on my part, reassured them that it was nothing; and all the time my heart was in my mouth. To add to my misfortunes, the roads grew so bad from the thaw that it took the driver a whole day sometimes to fetch the medicines.