Health through Will Power

Professor Stokes, the great Irish clinician of the nineteenth century, to whom we owe so

much of our knowledge of the diseases of the heart and lungs, and whose name is

enshrined in terms commonly used in medicine in connection with these diseases, has

told a striking story of his experiences in a Dublin hospital that illustrates this very well.

An old Irishman, who had been a soldier in his younger years and had been wounded

many times, was in the hospital ill and manifestly dying. Professor Stokes, after a careful

investigation of his condition, declared that he could not live a week, though at the end

of that time the old soldier was still hanging on to life, ever visibly sinking. Stokes

assured the students who were making the rounds of his wards with him that the old

man had at most a day or two more to live, and yet at the end of some days he was still

there to greet them on their morning visits. After the way of medical students the world

over, though without any of that hard-heartedness that would be supposed ordinarily to

go with such a procedure, for they were interested in the case as a medical problem, the

students began to bet how long the old man would live.