THE PAINS AND PLEASURES OF SYMPATHY.
[TO THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—Charles Lamb has a remark about sympathy which, after your interesting article in the Spectator of March 10th, it may be appropriate to quote.
Writing to Bernard Barton, he says :—" I am sitting opposite a person who is making strange distortions with the gout, which is not unpleasant,—to me at least. What is the reason we do not sympathise with pain, short of some terrible surgical operation P Hazlitt, who boldly says all he feels, avows that not only he does not pity sick people, but he bates them. I obscurely recognise his meaning. Pain is probably too selfish a consideration, too simply a consideration of self-attention. We pity poverty, loss of friends, &c.,—more complex things in which the sufferer's feelings are associated with others. This is a rough thought suggested by the presence of gout ; I want head to extricate it and plane it."
The planing has been done, I think, admirably in your columns. Is it true, however, that a physician's knowledge and experience of severe bodily sufferings " enlarges in- definitely the range of his imagination in this department of human trouble," and that therefore " his sympathy is deeper and truer by far than that of the ordinary observer "P
This is doubtless true of medical men blessed with finely organised natures ; but in general, does not the daily familiarity with suffering, and the strenuous effort to relieve it, tend, and very rightly, to diminish the intensity of a.
physician's sympathy P—I am, Sir, &o., J. D.
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