You may lament too, for a little while perhaps, the slow dawning of confidence in your new patients. But before very long you may even be rather overwhelmed (quite privately of course) by the freedom and completeness with which it is accorded you. And above all things, be just your natural self in dealing with them, forgetting, if you can, that you have ever even heard of such an attribute as a good bedside manner. This reminds me that only last week, in a railway carriage, I overheard two young ladies discussing a very sympathetic physician well known to us both. One of them was wondering why he had always been so successful. "Oh, that," said the other cheerfully, "is because he's so frightfully good at comforting the relatives--_afterwards_, you know." If your news must be bad, tell it soberly and promptly. It's seldom--very seldom--wise to conceal it for some dubious temporary benefit. And if you are in doubt about any of their maladies let them know it quite frankly, explaining to them in language suited to their degree of education and intelligence exactly why this should be the case. There's been a good deal written lately about the personal factor in treatment, the Psychology of the Physician, and the mental therapeutics at his command. And I even saw a letter in the "Lancet," a few weeks ago, urging that the practical application of Personality in the sick-room should form one of the recognised subjects of the medical curriculum. But in the first place, I'm exceedingly doubtful if the modesty of our profession is so excessively marked as to demand for its correction a course of instruction in the conscious prescribing of its own personality. And in the second, I fail to see how this latter could ever be done without, by the very act, considerably altering that uncertain quantity, at any rate so far as its victim was concerned. And what would one's _ego_ be like, I wonder, after ten years' conscientious labour? So I shouldn't worry too much about your personality if I were you. It will be a good thing, no doubt, to get all you can into it by encouraging such tentacles as it may put forth to the sun and the breeze. But what other people are to get out of it is a matter with which you may quite properly, I think, be too busy to concern yourself.