It has been very justly said that the sick are like children in this, that there is no _proportion_ in events to them. Now it is your business as their visitor to restore this right proportion for them--to show them what the rest of the world is doing. How can they find it out otherwise? You will find them far more open to conviction than children in this. And you will find that their unreasonable intensity of suffering from unkindness, from want of sympathy, &c., will disappear with their freshened interest in the big world's events. But then you must be able to give them real interests, not gossip. [Sidenote: Two new classes of patients peculiar to this generation.] NOTE.--There are two classes of patients which are unfortunately becoming more common every day, especially among women of the richer orders, to whom all these remarks are pre-eminently inapplicable. 1. Those who make health an excuse for doing nothing, and at the same time allege that the being able to do nothing is their only grief. 2. Those who have brought upon themselves ill-health by over pursuit of amusement, which they and their friends have most unhappily called intellectual activity. I scarcely know a greater injury that can be inflicted than the advice too often given to the first class to "vegetate"--or than the admiration too often bestowed on the latter class for "pluck." FOOTNOTES: [1] [Sidenote: Absurd statistical comparisons made in common conversation by the most sensible people for the benefit of the sick.] There are, of course, cases, as in first confinements, when an assurance from the doctor or experienced nurse to the frightened suffering woman that there is nothing unusual in her case, that she has nothing to fear but a few hours' pain, may cheer her most effectually. This is advice of quite another order. It is the advice of experience to utter inexperience. But the advice we have been referring to is the advice of inexperience to bitter experience; and, in general, amounts to nothing more than this, that _you_ think _I_ shall recover from consumption because somebody knows somebody somewhere who has recovered from fever.