[18]

[Sidenote:  The sick would rather be told a thing than have it read to them.]

Sick children, if not too shy to speak, will always express this wish.  They invariably prefer a story to be told to them, rather than read to them.

[19]

[Sidenote:  Sick suffer to excess from mental as well as bodily pain.]

It is a matter of painful wonder to the sick themselves how much painful ideas predominate over pleasurable ones in their impressions; they reason with themselves; they think themselves ungrateful; it is all of no use.  The fact is, that these painful impressions are far better dismissed by a real laugh, if you can excite one by books or conversation, than by any direct reasoning; or if the patient is too weak to laugh, some impression from nature is what he wants.  I have mentioned the cruelty of letting him stare at a dead wall.  In many diseases, especially in convalescence from fever, that wall will appear to make all sorts of faces at him; now flowers never do this.  Form, colour, will free your patient from his painful ideas better than any argument.

[20]

[Sidenote:  Desperate desire in the sick to “see out of window.”]

I remember a case in point.  A man received an injury to the spine, from an accident, which after a long confinement ended in death.  He was a workman—­had not in his composition a single grain of what is called “enthusiasm for nature,”—­but he was desperate to “see once more out of window.”  His nurse actually got him on her back, and managed to perch him up at the window for an instant, “to see out.”  The consequence to the poor nurse was a serious illness, which nearly proved fatal.  The man never knew it; but a great many other people did.  Yet the consequence in none of their minds, so far as I know, was the conviction that the craving for variety in the starving eye, is just as desperate as that for food in the starving stomach, and tempts the famishing creature in either case to steal for its satisfaction.  No other word will express it but “desperation.”  And it sets the seal of ignorance and stupidity just as much on the governors and attendants of the sick if they do not provide the sick-bed with a “view” of some kind, as if they did not provide the hospital with a kitchen.

[21]

[Sidenote:  Physical effect of colour.]

No one who has watched the sick can doubt the fact, that some feel stimulus from looking at scarlet flowers, exhaustion from looking at deep blue, &c.

[22]

[Sidenote:  Nurse must have some rule of time about the patient’s diet.]

Why, because the nurse has not got some food to-day which the patient takes, can the patient wait four hours for food to-day, who could not wait two hours yesterday?  Yet this is the only logic one generally hears.  On the other hand, the other logic, viz., of the nurse giving a patient a thing because she has got it, is equally fatal.  If she happens to have fresh jelly, or fresh fruit, she will frequently give it to the patient half-an-hour after his dinner, or at his dinner, when he cannot possibly eat that and the broth too—­or worse still leave it by his bed-side till he is so sickened with the sight of it, that he cannot eat it at all.