to the hardest of tasks, and is rather proud of the folly of
self-sacrifice. How often do we hear a woman say with pride, "I have not
slept nor had my clothes off for a week." She does not see that her very
affection unfits her for the calm control of the sick-room, and that her
inevitable anxiety is incompatible with tranquil judgment. If you tell
her that nursing is a profession, and that the amateur can never truly
fill the place of the regular, she smiles proudly, and thinks that
affection is capable of all things, and that what may be lost in skill
will be made up in thoroughness and compensated by watchfulness, such as
she believes fondly only love can command. It is hard to convince such a
woman.

It rarely chances that women are called upon to suffer in their common
lives emotional strains through very long periods, and at the same time
to sustain an excess of mental and physical labor. In days of financial
trouble this combination is sometimes fatal to the health of the
strongest men. When a loving relative undertakes to nurse one dear to
her through a protracted illness, she subjects herself to just such
conditions of peril as fall upon the man staggering under financial
adversity.

The analogy to which I have referred is curiously complete. In both
there is the combination of anxiety with physical and mental overwork,
and in both alike the hurtfulness of the trial is masked by the
excitement which furnishes for a while the means of waging unequal
battle, and prevents the sufferer from knowing or feeling the extent of
the too constant effort he or she is making. This is one of the evils of
all work done under excessive moral stimulus, and when the excitation
comes from the emotions the expenditure of nerve-force becomes doubly
dangerous, because in this case not only is the governing power taken
away from the group of faculties which make up what we call common
sense, but also because in women overtaxing the emotional centres is apt
to result in the development of some form of breakdown, and in the
secondary production of nervousness or hysteria.

If she cannot afford a nurse, or will not, let her at least share her
duties with some one. Above all, let her know that every competent
doctor watches even the best of his trained nurses, and insists that
they shall be in the open air daily. Your good wife or mother thinks in
her heart that when she has sickness at home she should not be seen out
of doors, and t