, &c.,
you little know how much your anxieties are thereby lightened; you
little know how intensified they become to those who can have no
change;[19] how the very walls of their sick rooms seem hung with their
cares; how the ghosts of their troubles haunt their beds; how impossible
it is for them to escape from a pursuing thought without some help from
variety.
A patient can just as much move his leg when it is fractured as change
his thoughts when no external help from variety is given him. This is,
indeed, one of the main sufferings of sickness; just as the fixed
posture is one of the main sufferings of the broken limb.
[Sidenote: Help the sick to vary their thoughts.]
It is an ever recurring wonder to see educated people, who call
themselves nurses, acting thus. They vary their own objects, their own
employments many times a day; and while nursing (!) some bed-ridden
sufferer, they let him lie there staring at a dead wall, without any
change of object to enable him to vary his thoughts; and it never even
occurs to them, at least to move his bed so that he can look out of
window.
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