[1]
[Sidenote: Sick suffer to excess from mental as well as bodily pain.]
It is a matter of painful wonder to the sick themselves, how much
painful ideas predominate over pleasurable ones in their impressions;
they reason with themselves; they think themselves ungrateful; it is all
of no use. The fact is, that these painful impressions are far better
dismissed by a real laugh, if you can excite one by books or
conversation, than by any direct reasoning; or if the patient is too
weak to laugh, some impression from nature is what he wants. I have
mentioned the cruelty of letting him stare at a dead wall. In many
diseases, especially in convalescence from fever, that wall will appear
to make all sorts of faces at him; now flowers never do this. Form,
colour, will free your patient from his painful ideas better than any
argument.
[2]
[Sidenote: Desperate desire in the sick to "see out of window."]
I remember a case in point. A man received an injury to the spine, from
an accident, which after a long confinement ended in death. He was a
workman--had not in his composition a single grain of what is called
"enthusiasm for nature"--but he was desperate to "see once more out of
window." His nurse actually got him on her back, and managed to perch
him up at the window for an instant, "to see out." The consequence to
the poor nurse was a serious illness, which nearly proved fatal. The man
never knew it; but a great many other people did. Yet the consequence in
none of their minds, so far as I know, was the conviction that the
craving for variety in the starving eye, is just as desperate as that of
food in the starving stomach, and tempts the famishing creature in
either case to steal for its satisfaction. No other word will express it
but "desperation." And it sets the seal of ignorance and stupidity just
as much on the governors and attendants of the sick if they do not
provide the sick-bed with a "view" of some kind, as if they did not
provide the hospital with a kitchen.
[3]
[Sidenote: Physical effect of colour.]
No one who has watched the sick can doubt the fact, that some feel
stimulus from looking at scarlet flowers, exhaustion from looking at
deep blue, &c.