The fretfulness and impatience of contradiction, which are so often the product of the nervousness of disease, are generally not to be combatted, but to be borne with. The considerations which I have already presented clearly show the propriety of this maxim; and yet it is a maxim which is very commonly neglected. Many a dispute about the most trivial things is held between the patient and the attendant or friend, when a little tact might have diverted the weakened mind from the subject, without yielding in the least anything, which pride of opinion or firmness would prompt to hold fast to. I once heard a mother, a woman of intelligence too, dispute with her sick daughter about the number of crackers she had eaten during the day, each maintaining her side of the question with as much zeal and pertinacity, as if it were a matter of vital importance. The result was that the patient was injuriously agitated by this rencontre about nothing, and ended it by bursting into tears, and the mother triumphed, as was her wont to do, by having the last word. And this was a fair specimen of the moral management of that patient during a long sickness. It added vastly to her nervousness, and clouded a mind filled with lofty, and refined, and tender sentiment, and made that chamber a scene of painful exhibition of thought and feeling, when a different management might have soothed her agitated nerves, and left the sensitive chords of her soul to respond clearly and harmoniously to the gentle touch of friendship and love. The patient often feels, and takes comfort in feeling, that his temporary outbursts of fretfulness and impatience are understood by his friends, as having no consonance with the real feelings of his heart. A much respected patient, of whose sickness I have many pleasant recollections, was one day speaking to me of his sister in the highest terms of eulogy. “Yet,” said he, “I scold at her, but I have no business to do it. However, she understands it. She knows that I am nervous, and that I am sometimes hardly myself and she forgives it all.” Let me not be understood to mean that all the notions and caprices of the sick are to be yielded to as a matter of course. I only object to an useless and injudicious warfare with them. There should always be firmness exercised in the management of the sick, but there should be no struggle with them from mere pride of opinion, or a desire for authority, or from want of a proper charity for their mental weakness. They should never be directly opposed, except it be distinctly and manifestly for their good.