Chemistry cannot tell this.  The patient’s stomach must be its own chemist.  The diet which will keep the healthy man healthy, will kill the sick one.  The same beef which is the most nutritive of all meat and which nourishes the healthy man, is the least nourishing of all food to the sick man, whose half-dead stomach can assimilate no part of it, that is, make no food out of it.  On a diet of beef tea healthy men on the other hand speedily lose their strength.

[Sidenote:  Home-made bread.]

I have known patients live for many months without touching bread, because they could not eat baker’s bread.  These were mostly country patients, but not all.  Home-made bread or brown bread is a most important article of diet for many patients.  The use of aperients may be entirely superseded by it.  Oat cake is another.

[Sidenote:  Sound observation has scarcely yet been brought to bear on sick diet.]

To watch for the opinions, then, which the patient’s stomach gives, rather than to read “analyses of foods,” is the business of all those who have to settle what the patient is to eat—­perhaps the most important thing to be provided for him after the air he is to breathe.

Now the medical man who sees the patient only once a day or even only once or twice a week, cannot possibly tell this without the assistance of the patient himself, or of those who are in constant observation on the patient.  The utmost the medical man can tell is whether the patient is weaker or stronger at this visit than he was at the last visit.  I should therefore say that incomparably the most important office of the nurse, after she has taken care of the patient’s air, is to take care to observe the effect of his food, and report it to the medical attendant.

It is quite incalculable the good that would certainly come from such sound and close observation in this almost neglected branch of nursing, or the help it would give to the medical man.

[Sidenote:  Tea and coffee.]

A great deal too much against tea[24] is said by wise people, and a great deal too much of tea is given to the sick by foolish people.  When you see the natural and almost universal craving in English sick for their “tea,” you cannot but feel that nature knows what she is about.  But a little tea or coffee restores them quite as much as a great deal, and a great deal of tea and especially of coffee impairs the little power of digestion they have.  Yet a nurse because she sees how one or two cups of tea or coffee restores her patient, thinks that three or four cups will do twice as much.  This is not the case at all; it is however certain that there is nothing yet discovered which is a substitute to the English patient for his cup of tea; he can take it when he can take nothing else, and he often can’t take anything else if he has it not.  I should be very glad if any of the abusers of tea would point out what to give to an English patient after a sleepless