How little the real sufferings of illness are known or understood. How
little does any one in good health fancy him or even _her_self into the
life of a sick person.
[Sidenote: Means of giving pleasure to the sick.]
Do, you who are about the sick or who visit the sick, try and give them
pleasure, remember to tell them what will do so. How often in such
visits the sick person has to do the whole conversation, exerting his
own imagination and memory, while you would take the visitor, absorbed
in his own anxieties, making no effort of memory or imagination, for the
sick person. "Oh! my dear, I have so much to think of, I really quite
forgot to tell him that; besides, I thought he would know it," says the
visitor to another friend. How could "he know it"? Depend upon it, the
people who say this are really those who have little "to think of."
There are many burthened with business who always manage to keep a
pigeon-hole in their minds, full of things to tell the "invalid."
I do not say, don't tell him your anxieties--I believe it is good for
him and good for you too; but if you tell him what is anxious, surely
you can remember to tell him what is pleasant too.
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