We who carry on hospital work do not make enough effort against suggestion in the case of patients coming into a hospital for the first time. It is sheer brutality to wheel a conscious patient into an operating room, fully equipped with rows of shining instruments ready to be used in his operation; into sight of white robed and masked surgeons and nurses. It is a brutality that works a lasting damage to the average patient. If we tried to make the hospital experience as nearly negative as

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... le, we would slip the patient into the side door of the hospital, as far removed as possible from the hospital sights and smells. We would see that he re ceived a good night's sleep before the opera tion, which looms before him as a terrible thing, a potential tragedy, and he should be given drugs to induce the sleep if it did not come naturally. We would put him under an anesthetic in his own room, so that he would not be terrified by a sight of the oper ating room, and its equipment. The psychic results of the operation, under such condi tions would be immeasurably less. 65