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and that ^'they have only a short time to live?"

I tell them as accurately as I can. And I know quite well what I have to expect from the various kinds of cancer as they become implanted at various sites and in different tissues so I know where radiation can be used to advantage, and where it will serve no purpose. Eradication is highly destructive and it should be reserved for those types of tumor which are truly truly sensitive to the rays - much more sensitive than the host tissues in which the tumor cells are growing. But I have studied so many cases that I can predict quite certainly the chances and the prognosis of each patient."

  I asked him how the patients accepted his judgement.
  "The Swedish people are perhaps a little tougher and

more phlegmatic than the Americans. Or perhaps the American people would be a little tougher if the cancer specialists would not treat them like children. At any rate, our patients accept the truth even when it is hard. They know that everything possible is done for them; so they trust me and they go home and put their affairs in order and live the rest of their lives with their families, quietly, and die when they must. Death does not seem so strange to them as it seems to your American people.

  The Inspector cut a slice from his pear and ate it slowly.
  "Swedes are cold-blooded.  I always noticed that."
  "It didn't strike me as cold-blooded.  He was really a man

of unusual charm and I felt that he did me great honor in talking to me, not as a young person and a lay one, but almost as a close friend, a colleague or a peer. And what he told me as we lay in our deck chairs, wrapped in rugs, with the cinders from the stacks falling in black specks on our hands and on the books, we were holding - ^'all of it' made a deep impression upon me. I thought that nobody could be greater than this unpretentious man, yes and that no endeavor could be better directed than toward the field of medicine. I suppose I was, in that moment, a youthful Faust