Part 15 (1/2)

Again, all laundresses, mistresses of dairy-farms, head nurses (I speak of the good old sort only--women who unite a good deal of hard manual labour with the head-work necessary for arranging the day's business, so that none of it shall tread upon the heels of something else) set great value, I have observed, upon having a high-priced tea. This is called extravagant. But these women are ”extravagant” in nothing else. And they are right in this. Real tea-leaf tea alone contains the restorative they want; which is not to be found in sloe-leaf tea.

The mistresses of houses, who cannot even go over their own house once a day, are incapable of judging for these women. For they are incapable themselves, to all appearance, of the spirit of arrangement (no small task) necessary for managing a large ward or dairy.

[26]

[Sidenote: Nurses often do not think the sick room any business of theirs, but only the sick.]

I once told a ”very good nurse” that the way in which her patient's room was kept was quite enough to account for his sleeplessness; and she answered quite good-humouredly she was not at all surprised at it--as if the state of the room were, like the state of the weather, entirely out of her power. Now in what sense was this woman to be called a ”nurse?”

[27] For the same reason if, after was.h.i.+ng a patient, you must put the same night-dress on him again, always give it a preliminary warm at the fire. The night-gown he has worn must be, to a certain extent, damp. It has now got cold from having been off him for a few minutes. The fire will dry and at the same time air it. This is much more important than with clean things.

[28]

[Sidenote: How a room is _dusted_.]

If you like to clean your furniture by laying out your clean clothes upon your dirty chairs or sofa, this is one way certainly of doing it.

Having witnessed the morning process called ”tidying the room,” for many years, and with ever-increasing astonishment, I can describe what it is.

From the chairs, tables, or sofa, upon which the ”things” have lain during the night, and which are therefore comparatively clean from dust or blacks, the poor ”_things_” having ”caught” it, they are removed to other chairs, tables, sofas, upon which you could write your name with your finger in the dust or blacks. The _other_ side of the ”things” is therefore now evenly dirtied or dusted. The housemaid then flaps every thing, or some things, not out of her reach, with a thing called a duster--the dust flies up, then re-settles more equally than it lay before the operation. The room has now been ”put to rights.”

[29]

[Sidenote: Atmosphere in painted and papered rooms quite distinguishable.]

I am sure that a person who has accustomed her senses to compare atmospheres proper and improper, for the sick and for children, could tell, blindfold, the difference of the air in old painted and in old papered rooms, _coeteris paribus_. The latter will always be musty, even with all the windows open.

[30]

[Sidenote: How to keep your wall clean at the expense of your clothes.]

If you like to wipe your dirty door, or some portion of your dirty wall, by hanging up your clean gown or shawl against it on a peg, this is one way certainly, and the most usual way, and generally the only way of cleaning either door or wall in a bed-room!

[31]

[Sidenote: Absurd statistical comparisons made in common conversation by the most sensible people for the benefit of the sick.]

There are, of course cases, as in first confinements, when an a.s.surance 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_ s.e.x, 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 s.e.xes, 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 s.e.x, 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.

Courts of justice seem to think that any body can speak ”the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” if he does but intend it. It requires many faculties combined of observation and memory to speak ”the whole truth”

and to say ”nothing but the truth.”

”I knows I fibs dreadful: but believe me, Miss, I never finds out I have fibbed until they tells me so,” was a remark actually made. It is also one of much more extended application than most people have the least idea of.