In
writings of fiction, whether novels or biographies, these death-beds are
generally depicted as almost seraphic in lucidity of intelligence. Sadly
large has been my experience in death-beds, and I can only say that I
have seldom or never seen such. Indifference, excepting with regard to
bodily suffering, or to some duty the dying man desires to perform, is
the far more usual state.
The "nervous case," on the other hand, delights in figuring to himself
and others a fictitious danger.
But the long chronic case, who knows too well himself, and who has been
told by his physician that he will never enter active life again, who
feels that every month he has to give up something he could do the month
before--oh! spare such sufferers your chattering hopes. You do not know
how you worry and weary them. Such real sufferers cannot bear to talk of
themselves, still less to hope for what they cannot at all expect.
So also as to all the advice showered so profusely upon such sick, to
leave off some occupation, to try some other doctor, some other house,
climate, pill, powder, or specific; I say nothing of the
inconsistency--for these advisers are sure to be the same persons who
exhorted the sick man not to believe his own doctor's prognostics,
because "doctors are always mistaken," but to believe some other doctor,
because "this doctor is always right.
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