You might just as well
give him a box on the ear. I have seen a patient fall flat on the ground
who was standing when his nurse came into the room. This was an accident
which might have happened to the most careful nurse. But the other is
done with intention. A patient in such a state is not going to the East
Indies. If you would wait ten seconds, or walk ten yards further, any
promenade he could make would be over. You do not know the effort it is
to a patient to remain standing for even a quarter of a minute to listen
to you. If I had not seen the thing done by the kindest nurses and
friends, I should have thought this caution quite superfluous.[16]
[Sidenote: Patients dread surprise.]
Patients are often accused of being able to "do much more when nobody is
by." It is quite true that they can. Unless nurses can be brought to
attend to considerations of the kind of which we have given here but a
few specimens, a very weak patient finds it really much less exertion to
do things for himself than to ask for them. And he will, in order to do
them, (very innocently and from instinct) calculate the time his nurse
is likely to be absent, from a fear of her "coming in upon" him or
speaking to him, just at the moment when he finds it quite as much as he
can do to crawl from his bed to his chair, or from one room to another,
or down stairs, or out of doors for a few minutes.
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