should be prescribed from the first, and it is
far better to find that the original rules may be profitably relaxed
than to be obliged to draw the lines more strictly when the patient has
at first been indulged. For instance, it is well to forbid the receipt
of any letters from home, unless anxious relatives insist that the
patient must have home news. In that case the letters should be mere
bulletins, should contain nothing, no matter how trifling, that might
annoy a too sensitive person, and, most important of all, should come to
the nurse and by her be read to the patient.

CHAPTER V.

REST.

I have said more than once in the early chapters of this little volume
that the treatment I wished to advise as of use in a certain range of
cases was made up of rest, massage, electricity, and over-feeding. I
said that the use of large amounts of food while at rest, more or less
entire, was made possible by the practice of kneading the muscles and by
moving them with currents able to effect this end. I desire now to
discuss in turn the modes in which I employ rest, massage, and
electricity, and, as I have promised, I shall take pains to give, in
regard to these three subjects, the fullest details, because success in
the treatment depends, I am sure, on the care with which we look after a
number of things each in itself apparently of slight moment.

I have no doubt that many doctors have seen fit at times to put their
patients at rest for great or small lengths of time, but the person who
of all others within my knowledge used this means most, and used it so
as to obtain the best results, was the late Professor Samuel Jackson. He
was in the habit of making his patients remain in bed for many weeks at
a time, and, if I recall his cases well, he used this treatment in just
the class of disorders among women which have given me the best results.
What these are I have been at some pains to define, and I have now only
to show why in such people rest is of service, and what I mean by rest,
and how I apply it.

In No. IV. of Dr. Seguin's series of American Clinical Lectures, I was
at some pains to point out the value of repose in neuralgias, and
especially sciatica, in myelitis, and in the early stages of locomotor
ataxia, and I have since then had the pleasure of seeing these views
very fully accepted. I shall now confine myself chiefly to its use in
the various forms of weakness which exist with thin blood and wasting,