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;[19] 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.[20]

I think it is a very common error among the well to think that “with a little more self-control” the sick might, if they choose, “dismiss painful thoughts” which “aggravate their disease,” &c.  Believe me, almost any sick person, who behaves decently well, exercises more self-control every moment of his day than you will ever know till you are sick yourself.  Almost every step that crosses his room is painful to him; almost every thought that crosses his brain is painful to him; and if he can speak without being savage, and look without being unpleasant, he is exercising self-control.

Suppose you have been up all night, and instead of being allowed to have your cup of tea, you were to be told that you ought to “exercise self-control,” what should you say?  Now, the nerves of the sick are always in the state that yours are in after you have been up all night.

[Sidenote:  Supply to the sick the defect of manual labour.]

We will suppose the diet of the sick to be cared for.  Then, this state of nerves is most frequently to be relieved by care in affording them a pleasant view, a judicious variety as to flowers,[21] and pretty things.  Light by itself will often relieve it.  The craving for “the return of day,” which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the desire for light, the remembrance of the relief which a variety of objects before the eye affords to the harassed sick mind.