presented to
patients are actual means of recovery.

But it must be _slow_ variety, e.g., if you shew a patient ten or twelve
engravings successively, ten-to-one that he does not become cold and
faint, or feverish, or even sick; but hang one up opposite him, one on
each successive day, or week, or month, and he will revel in the
variety.

[Sidenote: Flowers.]

The folly and ignorance which reign too often supreme over the
sick-room, cannot be better exemplified than by this. While the nurse
will leave the patient stewing in a corrupting atmosphere, the best
ingredient of which is carbonic acid; she will deny him, on the plea of
unhealthiness, a glass of cut-flowers, or a growing plant. Now, no one
ever saw "overcrowding" by plants in a room or ward. And the carbonic
acid they give off at nights would not poison a fly. Nay, in overcrowded
rooms, they actually absorb carbonic acid and give off oxygen.
Cut-flowers also decompose water and produce oxygen gas. It is true there
are certain flowers, e.g. lilies, the smell of which is said to depress
the nervous system. These are easily known by the smell, and can be
avoided.

[Sidenote: Effect of body on mind.]

Volumes are now written and spoken upon the effect of the mind upon the
body. Much of it is true. But I wish a little more was thought of the
effect of the body on the mind. You who believe yourselves overwhelmed
with anxieties, but are able every day to walk up Regent-street, or out
in the country, to take your meals with others in other rooms, &c., &c.,
you little know how much your anxieties are thereby lightened; you
little know how intensified they become to those who can have no
change;[1] 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 s