There are, of course cases, as in first confinements, when an assurance from the doctor or experienced nurse to the frightened suffering woman that there is nothing unusual in her case, that she has nothing to fear but a few hours’ pain, may cheer her most effectually.  This is advice of quite another order.  It is the advice of experience to utter inexperience.  But the advice we have been referring to is the advice of inexperience to bitter experience; and, in general, amounts to nothing more than this, that you think I shall recover from consumption, because somebody knows somebody somewhere who has recovered from fever.

I have heard a doctor condemned whose patient did not, alas! recover, because another doctor’s patient of a different sex, of a different age, recovered from a different disease, in a different place.  Yes, this is really true.  If people who make these comparisons did but know (only they do not care to know), the care and preciseness with which such comparisons require to be made, (and are made), in order to be of any value whatever, they would spare their tongues.  In comparing the deaths of one hospital with those of another, any statistics are justly considered absolutely valueless which do not give the ages, the sexes, and the diseases of all the cases.  It does not seem necessary to mention this.  It does not seem necessary to say that there can be no comparison between old men with dropsies and young women with consumptions.  Yet the cleverest men and the cleverest women are often heard making such comparisons, ignoring entirely sex, age, disease, place—­in fact, all the conditions essential to the question.  It is the merest gossip.

[32] A small pet animal is often an excellent companion for the sick, for long chronic cases especially.  A pet bird in a cage is sometimes the only pleasure of an invalid confined for years to the same room.  If he can feed and clean the animal himself, he ought always to be encouraged to do so.

[33] It is a much more difficult thing to speak the truth than people commonly imagine.  There is the want of observation simple, and the want of observation compound, compounded, that is, with the imaginative faculty.  Both may equally intend to speak the truth.  The information of the first is simply defective.  That of the second is much more dangerous.  The first gives, in answer to a question asked about a thing that has been before his eyes perhaps for years, information exceedingly imperfect, or says, he does not know.  He has never observed.  And people simply think him stupid.

The second has observed just as little, but imagination immediately steps in, and he describes the whole thing from imagination merely, being perfectly convinced all the while that he has seen or heard it; or he will repeat a whole conversation, as if it were information which had been addressed to him; whereas it is merely what he has himself said to somebody else.  This is the commonest of all.  These people do not even observe that they have not observed nor remember that they have forgotten.