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wrong in prescribing something black and bitter. I don't think I resisted it at the time on any moral basis. I knew that Fred had a large practice and I wouldn't have challenged him on his methods. But I would have felt puerile if I had attempted to do it the same way. Every doctor has to establish his characteristic methods in medicine just as much as in general social living. Fred did it convincingly, tongue in cheek, but I couldn't see myself doing it the same way. You know the argument always rises: if you don't do what they want, they'll go to the doctor who will. I think I hoped to convert the patient to my way, which I considered better, at least, than his way. Later, however, I became a little more strenuous about it and viewed that type of medical palavering as definitely second rate, a kind of greasy insult to the patient."

  "I know what you mean.  But you probably had something else in

mind when you were talking, some time back, about doing no damage, didn't you?"

  "Yes, although ^'again' it was only with a good bit of experience that I 

saw it as damage. I'm referring ^now^ to the things that doctors say, not the placebos they may prescribe. They feel that they are required to make some kind of a pronouncement and they have the urge to make it sound very professional or scientific. And actually that is what the patient came for, and is prepared to be fascinated by, and it is just that which makes the trouble. I think that you, Inspector, would be the one to understand from your own personal experience that the way we feel toward ourselves as sound, whole and healthy is very different from what we feel toward a sick or impaired self. Sickness arouses some of our deepest apprehensions and superstitions. It seems to us to come from the outside, hence it represents an attack or an invasion: something we eat, drink or breathe, even something we touch. And behind that something, you can see traces of the earliest war gods of all, those that earliest man recognized and set himself to placate. It is logical then, that we should keep looking around for those darkest of mysteries for one thing, to perform the roles of worry, that is, to genuflect repeatedly so that they won't think we are presuming to deny them. That is why simple reassurance is so useless in the anxiety states: the sufferer feels that his only means of loosening the grip of the war god is constant