Abstract
To the Editor.— The medical facts are as common as cornbread. A 70-year-old man came to my office in the middle of December. He was healthy except for a small hydrocele that he wanted me to fix. I told him that surgery was not necessary and he left without protest. The human facts are less clear. I knew that he was old and lonely and poor. I saw no depression and he was certainly not out of contact with reality. Somehow he must have had a desperate need, because on Christmas day in a tar-paper shack in an abandoned coal camp he blew out his brains with a shotgun. Perhaps I should have put him in a warm hospital full of Christmas decorations and young nurses happy with holiday plans. Perhaps I should have accepted the sacrifice of his small hydrocele in exchange for a good meal and a kind
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