With regard to fevers especially Graves' work will count for all time, because he set their treatment on so practical a basis. The trained nurse is quite a modern acquisition, yet seventy-five years ago Dr. Graves insisted that the services of a properly qualified nurse in severe, continued fever are inestimable. He emphasized the necessity for moral management in fever, and friends and relatives are seldom capable of discharging this office. "If they chance to discover from the physician's remarks or questions the weak points of the patient's case they generally contrive to let him know them in some way or another. If the patient is restless, for instance, the ill-judged anxiety of his friends {172} will most certainly keep him from sleeping. If he happens to take an opiate and they are aware of the nature of his medicine they will surely inform him of it in some way or another, though it may be only by a hint and his anxiety for sleep conjoined with their disturbing inquiries prevents its due operation." We are apt to think that the modern aphorism, nursing (meaning trained care) is more important than medicine in the treatment of fever, is the result of observations in our own day. Dr. Graves, however, felt very deeply that the most important element in the treatment is the conservation of the patient's strength with the preservation of his morale, and this can be best accomplished when the patient is constantly under the care of an experienced nurse, noting every symptom and averting every possible source of worry and every form of exhaustion of energy. With regard to fever treatment, however, Graves' name is immortal in medicine because of his insistence on the doctrine that fever patients must be fed. A century ago the presence of fever was supposed definitely to indicate that the patient should have no food. Any contribution to his nutrition was supposed to feed the fever rather than the patient. Graves pointed out, however, that at the end of a long-continued fever the most serious condition is the emaciation and weakness of the patient. He insisted that, appetite or no appetite, fever patients should be fed regularly. The result was at once noteworthy. Only the very hardy individuals had recovered before this; now even weaker patients had a good chance for life. The mortality from fever fell very strikingly, and in his time Dublin was overrun with typhoid and typhus fever and the saving of life produced by the new method of treatment was very considerable. Graves himself, when he saw how much he had accomplished by his {173} new doctrine, said that he wanted no better epitaph on his tombstone than the words, "He fed fevers."