THE ETHICS OF MEDICAL JUDGMENT. [TO THE EDITOR OF THE
" SPECTATOE.".1
SIR,—All laymen, and I should fancy most doctors also, will applaud Dr. Maylard's condemnation (Spectator, May 16th) of the gruesome picture now exhibiting at the Royal Academy. There are few of us who cannot produce authentic instances of extraordinary and apparently impossible recovery in the face of a solemn array of capital sentences by the faculty. For the sake of both patient and nurse, it is surely unwise to enter a verdict which Nature, let alone the curative power of faith, may at any moment unexpectedly set aside. In the Life of Darwin we are told how his father, Dr. Darwin, of Shrewsbury, declared that he had "often seen the paramount importance, for the sake of the patient, of keeping up the hope and with it the strength of the nurse in charge." And if the nurse is to be encouraged against despair, a fortiori, one would think, the patient himself. To all critical junctures in life no motto applies with greater obviousness or force than the final words of Goethe's famous hymn, so often on the lips of Carlyle : Wir heissen such hoffen.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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