Exclamations of grief, and the crowding of the family round the bed, only serve to harass the dying man, writes Ferriar, who adds, “The common practice of plying him with liquors of different kinds, and of forcing them into his mouth when he cannot swallow, should be totally abstained from.” But to this error I have already referred. It was a custom in the Middle Ages to strip the dying, drag them from their beds, and lay them on ashes or on mattresses of straw or hair upon the floor. It was then wholly or in part a penitential act, and the influence of this custom has, perhaps, not yet wholly ceased. “It is,” says Dr. Ferriar,[73] “a prevalent opinion among nurses and servants that a person whose death is lingering cannot quit life while he remains on a common bed, and that it is necessary to drag the bed away and place him on the mattress. This piece of cruelty is often practised when the attendants are left to themselves. A still more hazardous practice has been very prevalent in France and Germany, and I am afraid is not unknown in this country. When the patient is supposed by the nurses to be nearly in a dying state, they withdraw the pillows and bolster from beneath the head, sometimes with such violence as to throw the head back and to add greatly to the difficulty of respiration. As the avowed motive for this barbarity is a desire to put the patient out of pain--that is, to put him to death--it is incumbent on his friends to preserve him from the hands of those executioners. Perhaps a more deplorable condition can scarcely be conceived than that of being transferred from the soothing care of relations and friends, to the officious folly or rugged indifference of servants.” One would hope that such cruelty is a thing of the past. My own experience forty years since as a dispensary physician in the eastern parts of the metropolis, led me to conclude that it was not _then_ and _there_ wholly unknown or unpractised. What it may be in remote rural districts, where the class of old, ignorant and prejudiced nurses still exist, I have no means of knowing. “This is a state of suffering,” adds Dr. Ferriar, “to which we are all exposed, and if it were unavoidable, I should be far from desiring to unveil so afflicting a prospect. But the means of prevention are so easy, that I cannot forbear to solicit the public attention to them.”[74] In the intelligent trained nurses of the present day, we have the best security against such barbarity; and when they are absent, in the presence in the dying chamber, of the relations or nearest friends until all is over.