of
objects before the eye affords to the harassed sick mind.

Again, every man and every woman has some amount of manual employment,
excepting a few fine ladies, who do not even dress themselves, and who
are virtually in the same category, as to nerves, as the sick. Now, you
can have no idea of the relief which manual labour is to you--of the
degree to which the deprivation of manual employment increases the
peculiar irritability from which many sick suffer.

A little needle-work, a little writing, a little cleaning, would be the
greatest relief the sick could have, if they could do it; these _are_
the greatest relief to you, though you do not know it. Reading, though
it is often the only thing the sick can do, is not this relief. Bearing
this in mind, bearing in mind that you have all these varieties of
employment which the sick cannot have, bear also in mind to obtain for
them all the varieties which they can enjoy.

I need hardly say that I am well aware that excess in needle-work, in
writing, in any other continuous employment, will produce the same
irritability that defect in manual employment (as one cause) produces in
the sick.

VI. TAKING FOOD.

[Sidenote: Want of attention to hours of taking food.]

Every careful observer of the sick will agree in this that thousands of
patients are annually starved in the midst of plenty, from want of
attention to the ways which alone make it possible for them to take
food. This want of attention is as remarkable in those who urge upon the
sick to do what is quite impossible to them, as in the sick themselves
who will not make the effort to do what is perfectly possible to them.

For instance, to the large majority of very weak patients it is quite
impossible to take any solid food before 11 A.M., nor then, if
their strength is still further exhausted by fasting till that hour. For
weak patients have generally feverish nights and, in the morning, dry
mouths; and, if they could eat with those dry mouths, it would be the
worse for them. A spoonful of beef-tea, of arrowroot and wine, of egg
flip, every hour, will give them the requisite nourishment, and prevent
them from being too much exhausted to take at a later hour the solid
food, which is necessary for their recovery. And every patient who can
swallow at all can swallow these liquid things, if he chooses. But how
often do we hear a mutton-chop, an egg, a bit of bacon, ordered to a
patient for breakfast, to w