It rarely chances that women are called upon to suffer in their common
lives emotional strains through very long periods, and at the same time
to sustain an excess of mental and physical labor. In days of financial
trouble this combination is sometimes fatal to the health of the
strongest men. When a loving relative undertakes to nurse one dear to
her through a protracted illness, she subjects herself to just such
conditions of peril as fall upon the man staggering under financial
adversity.
The analogy to which I have referred is curiously complete. In both
there is the combination of anxiety with physical and mental overwork,
and in both alike the hurtfulness of the trial is masked by the
excitement which furnishes for a while the means of waging unequal
battle, and prevents the sufferer from knowing or feeling the extent of
the too constant effort he or she is making. This is one of the evils of
all work done under excessive moral stimulus, and when the excitation
comes from the emotions the expenditure of nerve-force becomes doubly
dangerous, because in this case not only is the governing power taken
away from the group of faculties which make up what we call common
sense, but also because in women overtaxing the emotional centres is apt
to result in the development of some form of breakdown, and in the
secondary production of nervousness or hysteria.
If she cannot afford a nurse, or will not, let her at least share her
duties with some one. Above all, let her know that every competent
doctor watches even the best of his trained nurses, and insists that
they shall be in the open air daily. Your good wife or mother thinks in
her heart that when she has sickness at home she should not be seen out
of doors, and that to eat, sleep, or care for herself is then wicked or
something like that.
If you can make a woman change her dress, eat often, bathe as usual, and
take the air, even if it must be so at night, she can stand a great
deal, especially if you insist that she shall sleep her usual length of
time. If she will not listen or obey, she runs a large risk, and is very
apt to collapse as the patient recovers, and to furnish her family with
a new case of illness, and the doctor and herself with some variety of
disorder of mind or body arising out of this terrible strain on both.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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