stioner believes the questioned
has really nothing the matter with him, which is very often the case.
But where there is, the remark holds good which has been made about
sleep. The _same_ answer will often be made as regards a patient who
cannot take two ounces of solid food per diem, and a patient who does
not enjoy five meals a day as much as usual.

Again, the question, How is your appetite? is often put when How is your
digestion? is the question meant. No doubt the two things depend on one
another. But they are quite different. Many a patient can eat, if you
can only "tempt his appetite." The fault lies in your not having got him
the thing that he fancies. But many another patient does not care
between grapes and turnips,--everything is equally distasteful to him.
He would try to eat anything which would do him good; but everything
"makes him worse." The fault here generally lies in the cooking. It is
not his "appetite" which requires "tempting," it is his digestion which
requires sparing. And good sick cookery will save the digestion half its
work.

There may be four different causes, any one of which will produce the
same result, viz., the patient slowly starving to death from want of
nutrition:

1. Defect in cooking;
2. Defect in choice of diet;
3. Defect in choice of hours for taking diet;
4. Defect of appetite in patient.

Yet all these are generally comprehended in the one sweeping assertion
that the patient has "no appetite."

Surely many lives might be saved by drawing a closer distinction; for
the remedies are as diverse as the causes. The remedy for the first is,
to cook better; for the second, to choose other articles of diet; for
the third, to watch for the hours when the patient is in want of food;
for the fourth, to show him what he likes, and sometimes unexpectedly.
But no one of these remedies will do for any other of the defects not
corresponding with it.

I cannot too often repeat that patients are generally either too languid
to observe these things, or too shy to speak about them; nor is it well
that they should be made to observe them, it fixes their attention upon
themselves.

Again, I say, what _is_ the nurse or friend there for except to take
note of these things, instead of the patient doing so?[35]

[Sidenote: As to diarrhoea.]

Again, the question is sometimes put, Is there diarrhoea? And the answer
will be the same, whether it is just merging into cholera, whether it is
a t