If the invalid is forced, by his avocations, to continue occupations requiring much thinking, the injury is doubly great.  In feeding a patient suffering under delirium or stupor you may suffocate him, by giving him his food suddenly, but if you rub his lips gently with a spoon and thus attract his attention, he will swallow the food unconsciously, but with perfect safety.  Thus it is with the brain.  If you offer it a thought, especially one requiring a decision, abruptly, you do it a real not fanciful injury.  Never speak to a sick person suddenly; but, at the same time, do not keep his expectation on the tiptoe.

[Sidenote:  And to well.]

This rule, indeed, applies to the well quite as much as to the sick.  I have never known persons who exposed themselves for years to constant interruption who did not muddle away their intellects by it at last.  The process with them may be accomplished without pain.  With the sick, pain gives warning of the injury.

[Sidenote:  Keeping a patient standing.]

Do not meet or overtake a patient who is moving about in order to speak to him, or to give him any message or letter.  You might just as well give him a box on the ear.  I have seen a patient fall flat on the ground who was standing when his nurse came into the room.  This was an accident which might have happened to the most careful nurse.  But the other is done with intention.  A patient in such a state is not going to the East Indies.  If you would wait ten seconds, or walk ten yards further, any promenade he could make would be over.  You do not know the effort it is to a patient to remain standing for even a quarter of a minute to listen to you.  If I had not seen the thing done by the kindest nurses and friends, I should have thought this caution quite superfluous.[2]

[Sidenote:  Patients dread surprise.]

Patients are often accused of being able to “do much more when nobody is by.”  It is quite true that they can.  Unless nurses can be brought to attend to considerations of the kind of which we have given here but a few specimens, a very weak patient finds it really much less exertion to do things for himself than to ask for them.  And he will, in order to do them, (very innocently and from instinct) calculate the time his nurse is likely to be absent, from a fear of her “coming in upon” him or speaking to him, just at the moment when he finds it quite as much as he can do to crawl from his bed to his chair, or from one room to another, or down stairs, or out of doors for a few minutes.  Some extra call made upon his attention at that moment will quite upset him.  In these cases you may be sure that a patient in the state we have described does not make such exertions more than once or twice a day, and probably much about the same hour every day.  And it is hard, indeed, if nurse and friends cannot calculate so as to let him make them undisturbed.  Remember, that many patients can walk who cannot stand or even sit up.  Standing is, of all positions, the most trying to a weak patient.