They are instinctively right. How often you hear
the person, charged with the request of giving the message or writing
the letter, say half an hour afterwards to the patient, "Did you appoint
12 o'clock?" or, "What did you say was the address?" or ask perhaps some
much more agitating question--thus causing the patient the effort of
memory, or worse still, of decision, all over again. It is really less
exertion to him to write his letters himself. This is the almost
universal experience of occupied invalids.
This brings us to another caution. Never speak to an invalid from
behind, nor from the door, nor from any distance from him, nor when he
is doing anything.
The official politeness of servants in these things is so grateful to
invalids, that many prefer, without knowing why, having none but
servants about them.
[Sidenote: These things not fancy.]
These things are not fancy. If we consider that, with sick as with well,
every thought decomposes some nervous matter,--that decomposition as
well as re-composition of nervous matter is always going on, and more
quickly with the sick than with the well,--that, to obtrude abruptly
another thought upon the brain while it is in the act of destroying
nervous matter by thinking, is calling upon it to make a new
exertion,--if we consider these things, which are facts, not fancies, we
shall remember that we are doing positive injury by interrupting, by
"startling a fanciful" person, as it is called.
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