But which symptoms are real and which are simulated? Here the tough or toughened organisation is usually hopelessly at sea. Here no information will enlighten, no rules will guide. If we are by nature incapable of making simple observations correctly, we had better give the whole thing up and go into another line of business. Even the so-called simulated symptoms are in a sense real symptoms of a morbid condition of brain; so, however good observers we may be, if we have not the wisdom and the patience to deal with these wisely and gently, we are still disqualified. “But nervous patients are so trying!” Why, of course they are. “Trying” is not the word. They are sometimes maddening. And nurses who are overworked, which they ought not to be, will be saints if they always contrive to keep their temper with them. We must remember, however, that lunatics and delirious people are trying also, and why should it be criminal to mismanage one kind of nervous disorder and not another? I was once travelling in a railway carriage in France. The stuffiness of the place was poisonous, and I ventured to lower one of the windows a few inches. Instantly a French gentleman, seated opposite to me, well out of the draught, reared himself up and descended upon me with indignation and with a positive sense of injury. He could not stand the cold. Why had I opened the window? He must really be permitted to shut it. An English gentleman explained that we wished for air. The Frenchman was amazed. “It surely cannot hurt you,” he said, with violent gesticulation, “to have the windows shut. But I, when they are open, I _suffer_.” It would have been impossible to convince him of the fact that I suffered when the window was shut as much as he did when it was open. Some of our nurses are very like this French gentleman. Let the patient have a cold, and they are quite pleased for her to put her feet in mustard and water. Let her have a shattered nervous system, and nine out of ten of them feel injured if they are told to stop their chatter. I have known women who were in many respects capable nurses rendered useless, as far as nervous patients were concerned, by the erroneous notions with which they had been impregnated. One nurse told me seriously that the proper way to manage a nervous invalid was to make her afraid of you. She had had no personal experience in the matter, and the little prattling monkey was hardly likely to inspire much terror; but that was what she had been taught.