Again, the question, How is your appetite? is often put when How is your digestion? is the question meant.  No doubt the two things depend on one another.  But they are quite different.  Many a patient can eat, if you can only “tempt his appetite.”  The fault lies in your not having got him the thing that he fancies.  But many another patient does not care between grapes and turnips,—­everything is equally distasteful to him.  He would try to eat anything which would do him good; but everything “makes him worse.”  The fault here generally lies in the cooking.  It is not his “appetite” which requires “tempting,” it is his digestion which requires sparing.  And good sick cookery will save the digestion half its work.

There may be four different causes, any one of which will produce the same result, viz., the patient slowly starving to death from want of nutrition: 

1.  Defect in cooking; 2.  Defect in choice of diet; 3.  Defect in choice of hours for taking diet; 4.  Defect of appetite in patient.

Yet all these are generally comprehended in the one sweeping assertion that the patient has “no appetite.”

Surely many lives might be saved by drawing a closer distinction; for the remedies are as diverse as the causes.  The remedy for the first is, to cook better; for the second, to choose other articles of diet; for the third, to watch for the hours when the patient is in want of food; for the fourth, to show him what he likes, and sometimes unexpectedly.  But no one of these remedies will do for any other of the defects not corresponding with it.

I cannot too often repeat that patients are generally either too languid to observe these things, or too shy to speak about them; nor is it well that they should be made to observe them, it fixes their attention upon themselves.

Again, I say, what is the nurse or friend there for except to take note of these things, instead of the patient doing so?[35]

[Sidenote:  As to diarrhoea.]

Again, the question is sometimes put, Is there diarrhoea?  And the answer will be the same, whether it is just merging into cholera, whether it is a trifling degree brought on by some trifling indiscretion, which will cease the moment the cause is removed, or whether there is no diarrhoea at all, but simply relaxed bowels.

It is useless to multiply instances of this kind.  As long as observation is so little cultivated as it is now, I do believe that it is better for the physician not to see the friends of the patient at all.  They will oftener mislead him than not.  And as often by making the patient out worse as better than he really is.

In the case of infants, everything must depend upon the accurate observation of the nurse or mother who has to report.  And how seldom is this condition of accuracy fulfilled.

[Sidenote:  Means of cultivating sound and ready observation.]