BACON ON DEATH.
[TO THE EDITOR Cr THE "SPECTATOR.") your review of M. Maeterlinck's essay you speak, when you " come to pages of less value." of " M. Maeterlinck's notion that doctors ought to put patients who are dying in pain out of life," which does not seem by any means tc secure your unqualified approval. 1 feel too strongly on this
awful matter myself perhaps to offer anything ; bat perhaps you could kindly find space for a few words from "the wisest of mankind " on the subject. In his "Advancement " Bacon observes:
"Nay, farther, I esteem it the office of a physician not only to restore health but to mitigate pain and dolors, and not only when such mitigation may conduce to recovery, but when it may serve to make a fair and easy passage : for it is no small felicity . . . but the physicians, contrariwise, do make a kind of scruple, and religion to stay with the patient after the disease is deplored . . whereas, in my judgment, they ought to give the attendances for the facilitating and assuaging the pains and agonies of death."
Beautiful and noble words, Sir, which, in my humble opinion,
should be engraved in letters of gold on the walls of every hospital in Christendom; not that "I-think the benign spirit
of the great philosopher which inspired them is by any means _altogether absent from these places as it is.—I am, Sir, &c.,
W. PLETCHER.
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