o feed herself.

In many cases I allow the patient to sit up in order to obey the calls
of nature, but I am always careful to have the bowels kept reasonably
free from costiveness, knowing well how such a state and the efforts it
gives rise to enfeeble a sick person.

The daily sponging bath is to be given by the nurse, and should be
rapidly and skilfully done. It may follow the first food of the day, the
early milk, or cocoa, or coffee, or, if preferred, may be used before
noon, or at bedtime, which is found in some cases to be best and to
promote sleep.

For some reason, the act of bathing, or even the being bathed, is
mysteriously fatiguing to certain invalids, and if so I have the general
sponging done for a time but thrice a week.

Most of these patients suffer from use of the eyes, and this makes it
needful to prohibit reading and writing, and to have all correspondence
carried on through the nurse. But many neurasthenic people also suffer
from being read to, or, in other words, from any prolonged effort at
attention. In these cases it will be found that if the nurse will read
the morning paper, and as she does so relate such news as may be of
interest, the patient will bear it very well, and will by degrees come
to endure the hearing of such reading as is already more or less
familiar.

Usually, after a fortnight I permit the patient to be read to,--one to
three hours a day,--but I am daily amazed to see how kindly nervous and
anaemic women take to this absolute rest, and how little they complain of
its monotony. In fact, the use of massage and the battery, with the
frequent comings of the nurse with food, and the doctor's visits, seem
so to fill up the day as to make the treatment less tiresome than might
be supposed. And, besides this, the sense of comfort which is apt to
come about the fifth or sixth day,--the feeling of ease, and the ready
capacity to digest food, and the growing hope of final cure, fed as it
is by present relief,--all conspire to make most patients contented and
tractable.

The intelligent and watchful physician must, of course, know how far to
enforce and when to relax these rules. When it is needful, as it
sometimes is, to prolong the state of rest to two or three months, the
patient may need at the close occupation of some kind, and especially
such as, while it does not tax the eyes, gives the hands something to
do, the patient being, we suppose, by this time able to sit up in bed