hat to eat, sleep, or care for herself is then wicked or
something like that.

If you can make a woman change her dress, eat often, bathe as usual, and
take the air, even if it must be so at night, she can stand a great
deal, especially if you insist that she shall sleep her usual length of
time. If she will not listen or obey, she runs a large risk, and is very
apt to collapse as the patient recovers, and to furnish her family with
a new case of illness, and the doctor and herself with some variety of
disorder of mind or body arising out of this terrible strain on both.

If physical tire, without chance for rest, with anxiety and incessant
vigilance, is thus apt to cause wrecks in the nurse of ordinary illness,
far more apt is it to involve breakdowns when a loving mother or sister
endeavors to care for a protracted case of insanity. Unless the man of
the house interferes, this effort is sure to bring disaster. And the
more sensitive, imaginative, and loving is the self-appointed nurse, the
more certain is she to suffer. There are no cases in which it is so hard
to advise, none in which it is so difficult to get people to follow your
advice. The morbid view of insanity, the vague sense of its being a
stain, the horror of the hospital, all combine to perplex and trouble
us. Yet here, if at any time, it is wise to cast the whole weight on the
physician and to abide by his decision.

Families see this peril, and can be often made to understand the
unwisdom of this sacrifice; but, in cases of prolonged disease, such as
hysteria in a bedridden sister or mother, it is hard to make them hear
reason, and still more hard to make the nursing relation understand that
she is of necessity the worst of nurses, and may share the wreck she
helps to make.

These old and happily rare cases of chronic nervous invalids are simply
fatal to loving nurses. I have said, perhaps too often, that invalidism
is for most of us a moral poison. Given a nervous, hysterical, feeble
woman, shut out from the world, and if she does not in time become
irritable, exacting, hungry for sympathy and petty power, she is one of
nature's noblest. A mother or sister gives herself up to caring for her.
She is in the grip of an octopus. Every fine quality of her nature helps
to hurt her, and at last she breaks down utterly and can do no more.
She, too, is become nervous, unhappy, and feeble. Then every one wonders
that nobody had the sense to see what was going