your advice when you can know nothing about
the truth, and admit you could not inquire into it.

To nurses I say--these are the visitors who do your patient harm. When
you hear him told:--1. That he has nothing the matter with him, and that
he wants cheering. 2. That he is committing suicide, and that he wants
preventing. 3. That he is the tool of somebody who makes use of him for
a purpose. 4. That he will listen to nobody, but is obstinately bent
upon his own way; and 5. That he ought to be called to the sense of
duty, and is flying in the face of Providence;--then know that your
patient is receiving all the injury that he can receive from a visitor.

How little the real sufferings of illness are known or understood. How
little does any one in good health fancy him or even _her_self 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.

A sick person also intensely enjoys hearing of any _material_ good, any
positive or practical success of the right. He has so much of books and
fiction, of principles, and precepts, and theories; do, instead of
advising him with advice he has heard at least fifty times before, tell
him of one b