It is a matter of painful wonder to the sick themselves, how much painful ideas predominate over pleasurable ones in their impressions; they reason with themselves; they think themselves ungrateful; it is all of no use.  The fact is, that these painful impressions are far better dismissed by a real laugh, if you can excite one by books or conversation, than by any direct reasoning; or if the patient is too weak to laugh, some impression from nature is what he wants.  I have mentioned the cruelty of letting him stare at a dead wall.  In many diseases, especially in convalescence from fever, that wall will appear to make all sorts of faces at him; now flowers never do this.  Form, colour, will free your patient from his painful ideas better than any argument.

[2] [Sidenote:  Desperate desire in the sick to “see out of window.”]

I remember a case in point.  A man received an injury to the spine, from an accident, which after a long confinement ended in death.  He was a workman—­had not in his composition a single grain of what is called “enthusiasm for nature”—­but he was desperate to “see once more out of window.”  His nurse actually got him on her back, and managed to perch him up at the window for an instant, “to see out.”  The consequence to the poor nurse was a serious illness, which nearly proved fatal.  The man never knew it; but a great many other people did.  Yet the consequence in none of their minds, so far as I know, was the conviction that the craving for variety in the starving eye, is just as desperate as that of food in the starving stomach, and tempts the famishing creature in either case to steal for its satisfaction.  No other word will express it but “desperation.”  And it sets the seal of ignorance and stupidity just as much on the governors and attendants of the sick if they do not provide the sick-bed with a “view” of some kind, as if they did not provide the hospital with a kitchen.

[3] [Sidenote:  Physical effect of colour.]

No one who has watched the sick can doubt the fact, that some feel stimulus from looking at scarlet flowers, exhaustion from looking at deep blue, &c.

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.