Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not

How little the real sufferings of illness are known or understood. How little does any one in good health fancy him or even herself into the life of a sick person. [Sidenote: Means of giving pleasure to the sick.] Do, you who are about the sick or who visit the sick, try and give them pleasure, remember to tell them what will do so. How often in such visits the sick person has to do the whole conversation, exerting his own imagination and memory, while you would take the visitor, absorbed in his own anxieties, making no effort of memory or imagination, for the sick person. "Oh! my dear, I have so much to think of, I really quite forgot to tell him that; besides, I thought he would know it," says the visitor to another friend. How could "he know it?" Depend upon it, the people who say this are really those who have little "to think of." There are many burthened with business who always manage to keep a pigeon-hole in their minds, full of things to tell the "invalid." I do not say, don't tell him your anxieties--I believe it is good for him and good for you too; but if you tell him what is anxious, surely you can remember to tell him what is pleasant too. A sick person does so enjoy hearing good news:--for instance, of a love and courtship, while in progress to a good ending. If you tell him only when the marriage takes place, he loses half the pleasure, which God knows he has little enough of; and ten to one but you have told him of some love-making with a bad ending.