[Sidenote:  Life often hangs upon minutes in taking food.]

If we did but know the consequences which may ensue, in very weak patients, from ten minutes’ fasting or repletion, (I call it repletion when they are obliged to let too small an interval elapse between taking food and some other exertion, owing to the nurse’s unpunctuality), we should be more careful never to let this occur.  In very weak patients there is often a nervous difficulty of swallowing, which is so much increased by any other call upon their strength that, unless they have their food punctually at the minute, which minute again must be arranged so as to fall in with no other minute’s occupation, they can take nothing till the next respite occurs—­so that an unpunctuality or delay of ten minutes may very well turn out to be one of two or three hours.  And why is it not as easy to be punctual to a minute?  Life often literally hangs upon these minutes.

In acute cases, where life or death is to be determined in a few hours, these matters are very generally attended to, especially in Hospitals; and the number of cases is large where the patient is, as it were, brought back to life by exceeding care on the part of the Doctor or Nurse, or both, in ordering and giving nourishment with minute selection and punctuality.

[Sidenote:  Patients often starved to death in chronic cases.]

But, in chronic cases, lasting over months and years, where the fatal issue is often determined at last by mere protracted starvation, I had rather not enumerate the instances which I have known where a little ingenuity, and a great deal of perseverance, might, in all probability, have averted the result.  The consulting the hours when the patient can take food, the observation of the times, often varying, when he is most faint, the altering seasons of taking food, in order to anticipate and prevent such times—­all this, which requires observation, ingenuity, and perseverance (and these really constitute the good Nurse), might save more lives than we wot of.

[Sidenote:  Food never to be left by the patient’s side.]

To leave the patient’s untasted food by his side, from meal to meal, in hopes that he will eat it in the interval, is simply to prevent him from taking any food at all.  I have known patients literally incapacitated from taking one article of food after another, by this piece of ignorance.  Let the food come at the right time, and be taken away, eaten or uneaten, at the right time; but never let a patient have “something always standing” by him, if you don’t wish to disgust him of everything.

On the other hand, I have known a patient’s life saved (he was sinking for want of food) by the simple question, put to him by the doctor, “But is there no hour when you feel you could eat?” “Oh, yes,” he said, “I could always take something at —­ o’clock and —­ o’clock.”  The thing was tried and succeeded.  Patients very seldom, however, can tell this; it is for you to watch and find it out.