Part 14 (2/2)

[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 famis.h.i.+ng 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.

[23]

[Sidenote: Intelligent cravings of particular sick for particular articles of diet.]

In the diseases produced by bad food, such as s...o...b..tic dysentery and diarrhoea, the patient's stomach often craves for and digests things, some of which certainly would be laid down in no dietary that ever was invented for sick, and especially not for such sick. These are fruit, pickles, jams, gingerbread, fat of ham or of bacon, suet, cheese, b.u.t.ter, milk. These cases I have seen not by ones, nor by tens, but by hundreds. And the patient's stomach was right and the book was wrong.

The articles craved for, in these cases, might have been princ.i.p.ally arranged under the two heads of fat and vegetable acids.

There is often a marked difference between men and women in this matter of sick feeding. Women's digestion is generally slower.

[24] It is made a frequent recommendation to persons about to incur great exhaustion, either from the nature of the service or from their being not in a state fit for it, to eat a piece of bread before they go.

I wish the recommenders would themselves try the experiment of subst.i.tuting a piece of bread for a cup of tea or coffee or beef tea as a refresher. They would find it a very poor comfort. When soldiers have to set out fasting on fatiguing duty, when nurses have to go fasting in to their patients, it is a hot restorative they want, and ought to have, before they go, not a cold bit of bread. And dreadful have been the consequences of neglecting this. If they can take a bit of bread _with_ the hot cup of tea, so much the better, but not _instead_ of it. The fact that there is more nourishment in bread than in almost anything else has probably induced the mistake. That it is a fatal mistake there is no doubt. It seems, though very little is known on the subject, that what ”a.s.similates” itself directly and with the least trouble of digestion with the human body is the best for the above circ.u.mstances.

Bread requires two or three processes of a.s.similation, before it becomes like the human body.

The almost universal testimony of English men and women who have undergone great fatigue, such as riding long journeys without stopping, or sitting up for several nights in succession, is that they could do it best upon an occasional cup of tea--and nothing else.

Let experience, not theory, decide upon this as upon all other things.

[25] In making coffee, it is absolutely necessary to buy it in the berry and grind it at home. Otherwise you may reckon upon its containing a certain amount of chicory, _at least_. This is not a question of the taste or of the wholesomeness of chicory. It is that chicory has nothing at all of the properties for which you give coffee. And therefore you may as well not give it.

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