Let your doubt be to yourself, your decision to them.
People who think outside their heads, the whole process of whose thought
appears, like Homer's, in the act of secretion, who tell everything that
led them towards this conclusion and away from that, ought never to be
with the sick.
[Sidenote: Irresolution most painful to them.]
Irresolution is what all patients most dread. Rather than meet this in
others, they will collect all their data, and make up their minds for
themselves. A change of mind in others, whether it is regarding an
operation, or re-writing a letter, always injures the patient more than
the being called upon to make up his mind to the most dreaded or
difficult decision. Farther than this, in very many cases, the
imagination in disease is far more active and vivid than it is in
health. If you propose to the patient change of air to one place one
hour, and to another the next, he has, in each case, immediately
constituted himself in imagination the tenant of the place, gone over
the whole premises in idea, and you have tired him as much by displacing
his imagination, as if you had actually carried him over both places.
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