r the very economical, and you
are going to get your money's worth out of your nurses.

The nurse who can get back of her patient's forehead and put her mind
there and let it work from the patient's point of view, will learn a
saving sense of humor, will be strict without antagonizing, will clear
away a lot of mental clouds and help to make permanent the cure the
treatment brings.

One can often judge very truly a patient's real character by his
reaction to his sickness. On the other hand, frequently it only
indicates that he has not yet properly adapted himself to a new
experience and a trying one. We hear so often, "Why, she's a different
person these days, since she's feeling better. It's a joy to do things
for her." She was the same person a while back, but had not learned to
accept discomfort. Any of the following list of adjectives we hear
applied to our patient again and again by the nurses:

unreasonable stubborn lazy deluded
cranky resistive unco-operative will-less
hipped obsessed hypocritical of mean disposition
excitable fearful exacting dissatisfied
undecided wilful self-centered morbid
doubtful demanding retarded abusive
depressed spineless self-satisfied

Unpleasant terms they are, and condemning ones if accepted as final.
When the nurse realizes that under the same conditions she would
probably merit them herself, she becomes more anxious to remove the
conditions, and less bent upon blame.

We must admit that the highest type person, when sick of any physical
illness, does not deserve such descriptive terms as these. But they are
the rare folks, few and far between; while the great mass of us have not
acquired more than enough self-control and thoughtfulness for the
ordinary routine of life. We are weakly upset by the unexpected. If it
is a pleasant unexpected, we are plus in our enthusiasm, and people
applaud; if the unpleasant unexpected, we fall short, and people deplore
our weakness. If we learn our lesson of self-control and adaptability,
and gain in beauty of character through experience, it has served a
purpose. But the nurse deals with the average of human nature, and she
finds their reaction faulty. Very often, if she is observant, she will
discover that a patient responds in a very different way to some other
nurse, who somehow finds that "