I'll tell you a phrase I... I use quite often, which I said to patients, 'I'd like to tell you what's in my mind about your illness'. Now, that was true, but it wasn't completely true so if I had a... I pretty well thought I knew what was going on but, you know, you have these sort of ticking off orders of probability in your mind, and somewhere at the bottom end was some horrible cancer, which I was pretty sure they didn't have, I didn't mention it, of course. So it was true, but it wasn't the whole truth.

[Q] Right. Right.

Yeah. And I did lie. When I saw more dying patients I lied to them, too, when I sensed that they didn't want to have that kind of conversation.

[Q] Lie in the, in the... do you remember it?

Well, I remember the very first time actually. It's funny, these individual things. I was the house surgeon on the surgical unit and a man was dying of cancer of the pancreas with secondaries and I went on the night round, which you know in those days when people did night rounds, now they're so busy, poor devils, they couldn't possibly, they're rushing from one person to another. It was the really big time for knowing what was going on. And he, he could just lift his head off the pillow. He said, 'I will be all right, won't I doctor?' And I took a deep breath and I said, 'You'll be fine. What does the ethicist say about that?

[Q] What does the practical doctor in you say about it? Would you change that now or...

No. No, I wouldn't. No, I wouldn't. No, no. And the hospice movement, although it's tremendously valuable – I mean, hugely changing – you do detect sometimes there's a bit of an agenda: this is the moment when we have everything out. Well, some people want it, and some people don't.