is
characteristic bluntness, set me to asking questions. What I learned
that day from the Doctor, coupled with later observations of his methods
in dealing with these unfortunates, has never needed unlearning. He saw
in these patients, wholly free from organic disorder, yet a prey to
aches and obsessions, to fears and depressions, the unhappy results of
that conflict in the subconscious self between the natural order of life
and the socially ordered life. He saw it and I am sure sorrowed over it.
Yet he never entered into a compact to treat them for what he knew they
did not have. He never left a stone unturned to prove to himself that
they suffered from no physical fault, and with his positive terseness he
rarely failed to prove that fact to them--freeing them, oftentimes for
good and all, from the fears and symptoms which assailed them, and
giving them in few and frank terms the key to their unconscious
calamity.
VII
All too soon for me passed that period of service in Dr. Janeway's
office, but as good fortune would have it, my future was still to feel
the touch of that fine association.
A year later, when my hospital work as an interne was over, Dr.
Janeway's son, Dr. Theodore Janeway, asked me to make my office in his
house. This arrangement continued for two or three years, when I found
myself going to Europe for a winter's special study. With my return to
New York, the necessity of a larger office brought that one-time closer
affiliation with the Doctor to an end. But the seeds were planted which
were destined to bear for me the fruit of one of those infrequent
friendships, the influence of which still goes on, finding fresh
inspiration from its memory.
I had not been long in my new quarters before I again began to feel the
result of Dr. Janeway's and his son's thoughts of me, for it was from
them that many of my first patients were referred, and it was from this
beginning that the happy relationship with the Doctor was steadily
continued as long as he remained in practice.
There was one remarkable thing about all these patients who came from
Dr. Janeway's office, or to those I was called to see at his suggestion;
one thing in which they seemed to differ from all other patients. They
came full of that faith which his thoughtful study and understanding of
their cases forced them to feel--and full of that faith which the deep
sincerity of his interest in their welfare inspired. It made my part
ea
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