Flour, oats, groats, barley, and their kind,
are as we have already said, preferable in all their preparations to all
the preparations of arrow root, sago, tapioca, and their kind. Cream, in
many long chronic diseases, is quite irreplaceable by any other article
whatever. It seems to act in the same manner as beef tea, and to most it
is much easier of digestion than milk. In fact, it seldom disagrees.
Cheese is not usually digestible by the sick, but it is pure nourishment
for repairing waste; and I have seen sick, and not a few either, whose
craving for cheese shewed how much it was needed by them.[23]
But, if fresh milk is so valuable a food for the sick, the least change
or sourness in it, makes it of all articles, perhaps, the most
injurious; diarrhoea is a common result of fresh milk allowed to become
at all sour. The nurse therefore ought to exercise her utmost care in
this. In large institutions for the sick, even the poorest, the utmost
care is exercised. Wenham Lake ice is used for this express purpose
every summer, while the private patient, perhaps, never tastes a drop of
milk that is not sour, all through the hot weather, so little does the
private nurse understand the necessity of such care.
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