el
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.

For instance, to the large majority of very weak patients it is quite
impossible to take any solid food before 11 A.M., nor then, if their
strength is still further exhausted by fasting till that hour. For weak
patients have generally feverish nights and, in the morning, dry mouths;
and, if they could eat with those dry mouths, it would be the worse for
them. A spoonful of beef-tea, of arrowroot and wine, of egg flip, every
hour, will give them the requisite nourishment, and prevent them from
being too much exhausted to take at a later hour the solid food, which
is necessary for their recovery. And every patient who can swallow at
all can swallow these liquid things, if he chooses. But how often do we
hear a mutton-chop, an egg, a bit of bacon, ordered to a patient for
breakfast, to whom (as a moment's consideration would show us) it must
be quite impossible to masticate such things at that hour.

Again, a nurse is ordered to give a patient a tea-cup full of some
article of food every three hours. The patient's stomach rejects it. If
so, try a table-spoon full every hour; if this will not do, a tea-spoon
full every quarter of an hour.

I am bound to say, that I think more patients are lost by want of care
and ingenuity in these momentous minutiae in private nursing than in
public hospitals. And I think there is more of the _entente cordiale_ to
assist one another's hands between the doctor and his head nurse in the
latter institutions, than between the doctor and the patient's friends
in the private house.

[Sidenote: Life often hangs upon minutes in taking food.]

If we did but know the consequences which may ensue, in very weak
patients, from ten minutes' fasting or repletion (I call it repletion
when they are obliged to let too small an interval elapse between taking
food and some other exertion, owing to the nurse's unpunct