orms an important branch of the
education of a nurse. To manage fancy patients forms an important branch
of her duties. But the nursing which real and that which fancied
patients require is of different, or rather of opposite, character. And
the latter will not be spoken of here. Indeed, many of the symptoms
which are here mentioned are those which distinguish real from fancied
disease.

It is true that hypochondriacs very often do that behind a nurse's back
which they would not do before her face. Many such I have had as
patients who scarcely ate anything at their regular meals; but if you
concealed food for them in a drawer, they would take it at night or in
secret. But this is from quite a different motive. They do it from the
wish to conceal. Whereas the real patient will often boast to his nurse
or doctor, if these do not shake their heads at him, of how much he has
done, or eaten, or walked. To return to real disease.

[Sidenote: Conciseness necessary with Sick.]

Conciseness and decision are, above all things, necessary with the sick.
Let your thought expressed to them be concisely and decidedly expressed.
What doubt and hesitation there may be in your own mind must never be
communicated to theirs, not even (I would rather say especially not) in
little things. Let your doubt be to yourself, your decision to them.
People who think outside their heads, the whole process of whose thought
appears, like Homer's, in the act of secretion, who tell everything that
led them towards this conclusion and away from that, ought never to be
with the sick.

[Sidenote: Irresolution most painful to them.]

Irresolution is what all patients most dread. Rather than meet this in
others, they will collect all their data, and make up their minds for
themselves. A change of mind in others, whether it is regarding an
operation, or re-writing a letter, always injures the patient more than
the being called upon to make up his mind to the most dreaded or
difficult decision. Farther than this, in very many cases, the
imagination in disease is far more active and vivid than it is in
health. If you propose to the patient change of air to one place one
hour, and to another the next, he has, in each case, immediately
constituted himself in imagination the tenant of the place, gone over
the whole premises in idea, and you have tired him as much by displacing
his imagination, as if you had actually carried him over both places.

Above all l