or convalescent where much nourishment is required.  Again, it is an ever ready saw that an egg is equivalent to a lb. of meat,—­whereas it is not at all so.  Also, it is seldom noticed with how many patients, particularly of nervous or bilious temperament, eggs disagree.  All puddings made with eggs, are distasteful to them in consequence.  An egg, whipped up with wine, is often the only form in which they can take this kind of nourishment.  Again, if the patient has attained to eating meat, it is supposed that to give him meat is the only thing needful for his recovery; whereas scorbutic sores have been actually known to appear among sick persons living in the midst of plenty in England, which could be traced to no other source than this, viz.:  that the nurse, depending on meat alone, had allowed the patient to be without vegetables for a considerable time, these latter being so badly cooked that he always left them untouched.  Arrowroot is another grand dependence of the nurse.  As a vehicle for wine, and as a restorative quickly prepared, it is all very well.  But it is nothing but starch and water.  Flour is both more nutritive, and less liable to ferment, and is preferable wherever it can be used.

[Sidenote:  Milk, butter, cream, &c.]

Again, milk and the preparations from milk, are a most important article of food for the sick.  Butter is the lightest kind of animal fat, and though it wants the sugar and some of the other elements which there are in milk, yet it is most valuable both in itself and in enabling the patient to eat more bread.  Flour, oats, groats, barley, and their kind, are, as we have already said, preferable in all their preparations to all the preparations of arrowroot, sago, tapioca, and their kind.  Cream, in many long chronic diseases, is quite irreplaceable by any other article whatever.  It seems to act in the same manner as beef tea, and to most it is much easier of digestion than milk.  In fact, it seldom disagrees.  Cheese is not usually digestible by the sick, but it is pure nourishment for repairing waste; and I have seen sick, and not a few either, whose craving for cheese shewed how much it was needed by them.[1]

But, if fresh milk is so valuable a food for the sick, the least change or sourness in it, makes it of all articles, perhaps, the most injurious; diarrhoea is a common result of fresh milk allowed to become at all sour.  The nurse therefore ought to exercise her utmost care in this.  In large institutions for the sick, even the poorest, the utmost care is exercised.  Wenham Lake ice is used for this express purpose every summer, while the private patient, perhaps, never tastes a drop of milk that is not sour, all through the hot weather, so little does the private nurse understand the necessity of such care.  Yet, if you consider that the only drop of real nourishment in your patient’s tea is the drop of milk, and how much almost all English patients depend upon their tea, you will see the great importance of not depriving your patient of this drop of milk.  Buttermilk, a totally different thing, is often very useful, especially in fevers.