Variety of form and brilliancy of colour in the objects presented to patients are actual means of recovery.

But it must be slow variety, e.g., if you shew a patient ten or twelve engravings successively, ten-to-one that he does not become cold and faint, or feverish, or even sick; but hang one up opposite him, one on each successive day, or week, or month, and he will revel in the variety.

[Sidenote:  Flowers.]

The folly and ignorance which reign too often supreme over the sick-room, cannot be better exemplified than by this.  While the nurse will leave the patient stewing in a corrupting atmosphere, the best ingredient of which is carbonic acid; she will deny him, on the plea of unhealthiness, a glass of cut-flowers, or a growing plant.  Now, no one ever saw “overcrowding” by plants in a room or ward.  And the carbonic acid they give off at nights would not poison a fly.  Nay, in overcrowded rooms, they actually absorb carbonic acid and give off oxygen.  Cut-flowers also decompose water and produce oxygen gas.  It is true there are certain flowers, e.g. lilies, the smell of which is said to depress the nervous system.  These are easily known by the smell, and can be avoided.

[Sidenote:  Effect of body on mind.]

Volumes are now written and spoken upon the effect of the mind upon the body.  Much of it is true.  But I wish a little more was thought of the effect of the body on the mind.  You who believe yourselves overwhelmed with anxieties, but are able every day to walk up Regent-street, or out in the country, to take your meals with others in other rooms, &c., &c., you little know how much your anxieties are thereby lightened; you little know how intensified they become to those who can have no change;[1] how the very walls of their sick rooms seem hung with their cares; how the ghosts of their troubles haunt their beds; how impossible it is for them to escape from a pursuing thought without some help from variety.

A patient can just as much move his leg when it is fractured as change his thoughts when no external help from variety is given him.  This is, indeed, one of the main sufferings of sickness; just as the fixed posture is one of the main sufferings of the broken limb.

[Sidenote:  Help the sick to vary their thoughts.]

It is an ever recurring wonder to see educated people, who call themselves nurses, acting thus.  They vary their own objects, their own employments, many times a day; and while nursing (!) some bed-ridden sufferer, they let him lie there staring at a dead wall, without any change of object to enable him to vary his thoughts; and it never even occurs to them, at least to move his bed so that he can look out of window.  No, the bed is to be always left in the darkest, dullest, remotest, part of the room.[2]