Life in the sick-room : $b EssaysMartineau, Harriet
Science
Life in the sick-room : $b Essays
Martineau, Harriet
Conduct of life; Sick
non-essential modes and appearances prescribed or suggested by the
passions, needs, or follies of the time. It is most wise, and should be
easy, to have faith that the determining conditions of all experimental
discovery will be ascertained in due season. If, meanwhile, we can
obtain from the magnetisers any light as to any function of the nervous
system, we may excuse them from the performance of some promised feats.
If the Homœopathists can help us to any new principle of natural
antagonism to disease, they may well abide the laugh which I am not
aware that the serious of their number have ever provoked by any extreme
and unsupported pretensions.
* * * * *
But at this rate, occupying this scope, I shall never have done. I might
write on for every day of my life, and be no nearer the end of our
speculations. Let what I have said go for specimens of our observation
of life in two or three particulars. When I think of what I have seen
with my own eyes from one back window, in the few years of my illness;
of how indescribably clear to me are many truths of life from my
observation of the doings of the tenants of a single row of houses; it
seems to me scarcely necessary to see more than the smallest sample, in
order to analyse life in its entireness. I could fill a volume--and an
interesting one too--with a simple detail of what I have witnessed, as I
said, from one back-window. But I must tell, nothing. These two or three
little courts and gardens ought to be as sacred as any interior. Nothing
of the spy shall mix itself with my relation to neighbours who have
ever been kind to me. Suffice it, that if I saw no further into the
world with the mental than with the bodily eye, I should be kept in a
state of perpetual wonder, (of pleasing wonder, on the whole,) at the
operation of the human heart and mind, in its most ordinary
circumstances. Nothing can be more ordinary than the modes of life which
I overlook, yet am I kept wide awake in my watch by ever new instances
of the fulness of pleasure derivable from the scantiest sources; of the
vividness of emotion excitable by the most trifling incidents; of the
wonderful power pride has of pampering itself upon the most meagre food;
and, above all, of the infinite ingenuity of human love. Nothing,
perhaps, has impressed me so deeply as the clear view I have of almost
all, if not quite the whole, of the suffering I have witnessed being the
consequence of vice or ignorance. But when my heart has sickened at the
sight, and at the thought of so much gratuitous pain, it has grown
strong again in the reflection that, if unnecessary, this misery is
temporary,--that the true ground of mourning would be if the pain were
not from causes which are remediable. Then I cannot but look forward to
the time when the bad training of children,--the petulancies of
neighbours--the errors of the ménage--the irksome superstitions, and the
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