u may be.

Surely you can learn at least to judge with the eye how much an oz. of
solid food is, how much an oz. of liquid. You will find this helps your
observation and memory very much, you will then say to yourself "A. took
about an oz. of his meat to day;" "B. took three times in 24 hours about
1/4 pint of beef tea;" instead of saying "B. has taken nothing all day,"
or "I gave A. his dinner as usual."

[Sidenote: Sound and ready observation essential in a nurse.]

I have known several of our real old-fashioned hospital "sisters," who
could, as accurately as a measuring glass, measure out all their
patients' wine and medicine by the eye, and never be wrong. I do not
recommend this, one must be very sure of one's self to do it. I only
mention it, because if a nurse can by practice measure medicine by the
eye, surely she is no nurse who cannot measure by the eye about how much
food (in oz.) her patient has taken.[36] In hospitals those who cut up
the diets give with quite sufficient accuracy, to each patient, his 12
oz. or his 6 oz. of meat without weighing. Yet a nurse will often have
patients loathing all food and incapable of any will to get well, who
just tumble over the contents of the plate or dip the spoon in the cup
to deceive the nurse, and she will take it away without ever seeing that
there is just the same quantity of food as when she brought it, and she
will tell the doctor, too, that the patient has eaten all his diets as
usual, when all she ought to have meant is that she has taken away his
diets as usual.

Now what kind of a nurse is this?

[Sidenote: Difference of excitable and _accumulative_ temperaments.]

I would call attention to something else, in which nurses frequently
fail in observation. There is a well-marked distinction between the
excitable and what I will call the _accumulative_ temperament in
patients. One will blaze up at once, under any shock or anxiety, and
sleep very comfortably after it; another will seem quite calm and even
torpid, under the same shock, and people say, "He hardly felt it at
all," yet you will find him some time after slowly sinking. The same
remark applies to the action of narcotics, of aperients, which, in the
one, take effect directly, in the other not perhaps for twenty-four
hours. A journey, a visit, an unwonted exertion, will affect the one
immediately, but he recovers after it; the other bears it very well at
the time, apparently, and dies or is prostrat