but nature, relentless still, has in store possibilities of utmost
anguish, which seem to fall alike on the guilty and the innocent, the
poor and the rich, and in largest proportion on the gentler sex. But
while pain is still here with its ever-ready presence, the direct means
of lessening it have multiplied so that hardly a month goes by without
some new method being added of destroying for a time the power to
suffer. For, bear in mind that it is not usually the cause which can be
at once destroyed by drugs, but only the bodily capacity to react to it
in the fashion we call pain. Ether, chloroform, cocaine, and many other
drugs enable us to-day to feel sure that the mass of real pain in the
world is vastly less than it was. It is, indeed, possible to prevent all
pain, and pain has no real value which we need respect and desire to
preserve; at least this is so from the physician's stand-point.

The temptation which comes to us out of the accumulation of anæsthetic
agents is one which every tender-hearted man can understand. The
temptations which it presents to the suffering they only know who have
suffered. To this all that I have said leads up. To most women, even to
strong women, there comes a time when pain is a grim presence in their
lives. If brief, the wise physician calls upon them for that endurance,
of the value of which I have spoken. On some he calls in vain. Even if
it recur at intervals, as in the shape of neuralgic headaches, in the
name of reason let him be the sole judge of your need to be relieved by
drugs. He well knows, as you cannot know, that the frequent use of
morphia seems in the end to increase, not to lessen, the whole amount of
probable future pain, and that what eases for a time is a devil in
angelic disguise. If you are urgent, weak of will, unable through
unrestraint to comprehend him, the fault will be only half his, if you
plead too eagerly for help and too constantly claim the relief he holds.