=Telling the Truth to the Patient.= The most difficult of the nurse’s duties, and the saddest, is to tell the patient the nature of his disease. Yet this must be done, for unless he knows from the very beginning, it is impossible to exact from him that intelligent co-operation upon which rests his sole hope. Only on the rarest occasions is there any justification for withholding this knowledge. If a patient has but a few more days to live, or if a hopeless case is surrounded by scrupulous care and attention, this information may, if it seems best, be withheld. But these are exceptional instances. To hide the truth from an early or moderately advanced case would be criminal. Apart from the first shock, people are never really injured by being told the truth, and we all know of hundreds of cases in which lives have been ruthlessly sacrificed through the policy of silence. The truth need not necessarily be brutal—it can be made full of hope, interest, and encouragement. In her efforts to encourage the patient, however, the nurse must be exceedingly careful never to use the word “cure.” Tuberculosis is never cured in the sense that typhoid fever is cured, for example. At best, it is only arrested—that is, brought to a standstill, to a point where the destruction of the lung tissue goes no farther. Thus, if a person loses one or two fingers from a hand, a cure would imply that these lost fingers could be made to grow again. The lung tissue destroyed by tuberculosis can not be replaced or renewed any more than lost fingers can be renewed. Yet a lung, in spite of this loss, is still able to serve its owner well and enable him to lead a useful and happy life, just as a hand which has lost a finger or two may still be a fairly useful hand, and serve its owner well. This distinction between arrest and cure must be made perfectly clear to the patient, and he must also be taught that whether the arrest of the disease is temporary or permanent depends in large measure upon himself. His improvement depends upon his thorough understanding of his illness, and upon his ability or willingness to co-operate as to treatment. According to Dr. Minor,[3] it is not so much what a patient has in his lungs, as what he has in his head; namely, common-sense, which determines his recovery. Therefore to keep a patient in the dark concerning his condition, and yet expect him, without knowing the reason, to do over and over again the tiresome routine things necessary to improvement, is to expect the impossible. Footnote 3: Dr. Charles L. Minor, Asheville, North Carolina.