"The mischief for which the common law did not provide was that confidences reposed by sick people in their medical men were not safe. Communications were only part of such confidences. No matter what the confidence was - howsoever intimate, and in whatsoever manner gained - he who held it was compellable to disclose it in the interests of justice. The range of confidence in matters of bodily health is much wider than in the case of the confessional. A penitent makes his confession by narration of his sins. A patient, on the other hand, has not only symptoms to relate, but a body to lay bare as the course of his symptoms. There may be anguish long concealed, now first to be discovered by the doctor, or a drug taking habit which for worlds he would not let anybody trace to its cause; or he may have secreted in his room something which, without word spoken or sign made, will, when the doctor sees it, tell him that which he needs to know. The nature or position of a wound or lesion may be his inner-most secret, but he must either exhibit it or remain ill and perhaps die. The fact that this medical man was bound to disclose to the world in open Court, whenever so directed by the tribunal, every bit of the information he had gained during professional attendance, could not but act as a deterrent, so as to cause patients in many cases to suffer agony, and perhaps death, rather than divulge facts inexorably kept secret. That dread, whether the fear of exposure and humiliation or the recoil from the infliction of injury or grief on others, was the real 'mischief' which the common law did not provide against, if the legislature saw fit to consider it a mischief; and their opinion is easily traced in the width of the terms they adopted in their provision, as well as in the sharpness with which they differentiated between this large class of confidences and others which might be maintained by protecting only communications."