tensified they become to those who can have no
change;[19] how the very walls of their sick rooms seem hung with their
cares; how the ghosts of their troubles haunt their beds; how impossible
it is for them to escape from a pursuing thought without some help from
variety.

A patient can just as much move his leg when it is fractured as change
his thoughts when no external help from variety is given him. This is,
indeed, one of the main sufferings of sickness; just as the fixed
posture is one of the main sufferings of the broken limb.

[Sidenote: Help the sick to vary their thoughts.]

It is an ever recurring wonder to see educated people, who call
themselves nurses, acting thus. They vary their own objects, their own
employments many times a day; and while nursing (!) some bed-ridden
sufferer, they let him lie there staring at a dead wall, without any
change of object to enable him to vary his thoughts; and it never even
occurs to them, at least to move his bed so that he can look out of
window. No, the bed is to be always left in the darkest, dullest,
remotest, part of the room.[20]

I think it is a very common error among the well to think that "with a
little more self-control" the sick might, if they choose, "dismiss
painful thoughts" which "aggravate their disease," &c. Believe me,
almost _any_ sick person, who behaves decently well, exercises more
self-control every moment of his day than you will ever know till you
are sick yourself. Almost every step that crosses his room is painful to
him; almost every thought that crosses his brain is painful to him; and
if he can speak without being savage, and look without being unpleasant,
he is exercising self-control.

Suppose you have been up all night, and instead of being allowed to have
your cup of tea, you were to be told that you ought to "exercise
self-control," what should you say? Now, the nerves of the sick are
always in the state that yours are in after you have been up all night.

[Sidenote: Supply to the sick the defect of manual labour.]

We will suppose the diet of the sick to be cared for. Then, this state
of nerves is most frequently to be relieved by care in affording them a
pleasant view, a judicious variety as to flowers,[21] and pretty things.
Light by itself will often relieve it. The craving for "the return of
day," which the sick so constantly evince, is generally nothing but the
desire for light, the remembrance of the relief which a variety