. Organic
chemistry is useful, as all knowledge is, when we come face to face with
nature; but it by no means follows that we should learn in the
laboratory any one of the reparative processes going on in disease.

Again, the nutritive power of milk and of the preparations from milk, is
very much undervalued; there is nearly as much nourishment in half a
pint of milk as there is in a quarter of a lb. of meat. But this is not
the whole question or nearly the whole. The main question is what the
patient's stomach can assimilate or derive nourishment from, and of this
the patient's stomach is the sole judge. Chemistry cannot tell this. The
patient's stomach must be its own chemist. The diet which will keep the
healthy man healthy, will kill the sick one. The same beef which is the
most nutritive of all meat and which nourishes the healthy man, is the
least nourishing of all food to the sick man, whose half-dead stomach
can _assimilate_ no part of it, that is, make no food out of it. On a
diet of beef tea healthy men on the other hand speedily lose their
strength.

[Sidenote: Home-made bread.]

I have known patients live for many months without touching bread,
because they could not eat baker's bread. These were mostly country
patients, but not all. Home-made bread or brown bread is a most
important article of diet for many patients. The use of aperients may be
entirely superseded by it. Oat cake is another.

[Sidenote: Sound observation has scarcely yet been brought to bear on
sick diet.]

To watch for the opinions, then, which the patient's stomach gives,
rather than to read "analyses of foods," is the business of all those
who have to settle what the patient is to eat--perhaps the most
important thing to be provided for him after the air he is to breathe.

Now the medical man who sees the patient only once a day or even only
once or twice a week, cannot possibly tell this without the assistance
of the patient himself, or of those who are in constant observation on
the patient. The utmost the medical man can tell is whether the patient
is weaker or stronger at this visit than he was at the last visit. I
should therefore say that incomparably the most important office of the
nurse, after she has taken care of the patient's air, is to take care to
observe the effect of his food, and report it to the medical attendant.

It is quite incalculable the good that would certainly come from such
_sound_ and close observ