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friend in whom one had invested something of one’s personality was, I discovered, to have lost a certain amount of one’s self.
    The successful pursuit of the philosophy now before you demands that you restore whatever of your personality has been dissipated, carted off by other people. If any of its essential energy has been scattered, it must be recovered.
    The original proposer of this theory, aware of the importance of insuring against such losses, advised that all misunderstandings should be settled on the spot. When an estrangement takes a friend out of your normal contacts with him, he leaves with part of you in his hand. You must gather up these fragments of yourself, by some hook or crook, so that you have at least all of the personality that rightfully belongs to you, before you attempt its larger projection.
    In the next place: you may make the mistake of seeking far and wide for opportunities to build yourself into other personalities through their rehabilitation. A happy circumstance kept me from doing that. Strangely enough, the first really important service I was permitted to do, prefatory to experimenting with this mysterious dynamic, was for the daughter of the man who had shown me the way to it…I risked what small repute I had, and put a mortgage on whatever I might hope to acquire, by the performance of an operation that saved her life, and, quite incidentally, brought me three pages of comment in the next edition of the Medical Encyclopedia.

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    Brightwood Hospital
Sunday Night, November 9, 1913
    T hat operation on Natalie Randolph’s fractured skull marked the beginning of my specialization in brain surgery, and because of its importance in determining the nature of my professional activities, I feel that the events which immediately preceded it should be recorded here. If you prefer to consider them as coincidental rather than causative, you are quite at liberty to make that deduction. In my own opinion, my investment in Tim Watson and the success of my operation on Natalie Randolph were integrally related.
    On Wednesdays and Saturdays, that summer, I was on duty in the Out-Patient Department of our Free Clinic. This assignment was extremely distasteful. Ailing indigence, bathed and fumigated and in bed, clad in a sterilized hospital gown, was one thing; sick poverty, on its feet, with black fingernails, greasy clothes, a musty smell, and a hangdog air, was offensive to me. I was not a snob. I was born poor and brought up in a home where the most rigid economies were practiced.
    The first new suit of clothes I ever owned (it cost sixteen dollars) was purchased when I entered high school. But all the same, I thoroughly detested those long, hot, midsummer afternoons in the dingy Free Clinic, and I am afraid I made very little effort to disguise my aversion to the dull and dirty patients who grimly applied for its benefits.
    For the most part, it was a thankless task. Not many of them co-operated with us. They wouldn’t take their medicine according to directions; complained that their treatment did them no good; the majority of them were surly, stupid, and stubborn. Many of the men stank of cheap liquor and tried to wheedle you out of a half-dollar to buy more.
    Perhaps if there had been only a few patients to deal with, during an afternoon, one might have been more disposed to analyze their disgusting infirmities with more sympathy and listen to their assorted misfortunes with more interest; but they came too thick and fast for painstaking attention. In my own defense I must insist that it wasn’t their poverty that exasperated me, for God knows I was having a struggle to make both ends meet, myself. My salary was small, and it was difficult to economize. Little Joyce required the attention of a full-time practical nurse, who served also as my housekeeper. Those were difficult days, and I was in a position to be sympathetic with any man whose pockets were empty.
    But I hated that clinic. Our