Professor Stokes, the great Irish clinician of the nineteenth century, to whom we owe so
much of our knowledge of the diseases of the heart and lungs, and whose name is
enshrined in terms commonly used in medicine in connection with these diseases, has
told a striking story of his experiences in a Dublin hospital that illustrates this very well.
An old Irishman, who had been a soldier in his younger years and had been wounded
many times, was in the hospital ill and manifestly dying. Professor Stokes, after a careful
investigation of his condition, declared that he could not live a week, though at the end
of that time the old soldier was still hanging on to life, ever visibly sinking. Stokes
assured the students who were making the rounds of his wards with him that the old
man had at most a day or two more to live, and yet at the end of some days he was still
there to greet them on their morning visits. After the way of medical students the world
over, though without any of that hard-heartedness that would be supposed ordinarily to
go with such a procedure, for they were interested in the case as a medical problem, the
students began to bet how long the old man would live.