=Incidental Assistance.= There are many occasions when the nurse should ask for relief, and when this should be freely and generously given. When a patient enters an institution, it may be necessary to pension his family during his absence; assurance of their welfare will enable him to leave with an easy mind. Unless such provision is made, we are threatened with the alternative of seeing him sit at home, unable to work, but engaged in the minor though highly dangerous occupation of caring for the children while his wife goes out to service. Relief may also be of a temporary nature. While a patient waits for admission to a hospital he may be too sick to remain alone at home. This may mean that his wife, the breadwinner, is forced to give up work in order to care for him. Assistance should be given during this waiting period, after which time the wife will return to her employment and the family affairs readjust themselves. Again, we may have a family in which the patient himself is the only one who needs help, the income sufficing for all ordinary demands, but not for the extraordinary demands of illness. While awaiting admission to an institution, it may be necessary to give him extra food, extra clothing or bed clothing, an overcoat, railway fare, or something of like nature, either to make him comfortable, or to facilitate his removal when the time comes. The patient must not be allowed to suffer during this enforced wait, but this assistance must not be interpreted as encouragement to remain at home. In the foregoing instances, relief has been conditional upon removal. We must sometimes give assistance under other circumstances. If there are no hospital facilities, or if he will not avail himself of them, we are doing good preventive work if we give the patient an extra bed, since this may result in his partial separation from the children or other members of the household. Extra clothing may also be given under like conditions. On the other hand, if we gave milk and eggs to the patient, we should be supplying food which would maintain indefinitely a centre of infection. (Good preventive work may be accomplished by ample feeding of the other members of the household, thus increasing their resistance. In this case we should be sure that this food is taken by the children, or by those for whom it was intended, since otherwise it would be wasted.) Let us put the matter very frankly: it is wrong to prolong a patient’s life, unless at the same time we can make him harmless to those about him. If the two are coincident, well and good. If not, then the shorter the exposure, the better for all those who must submit to it. We repeat what was said at the beginning of the chapter: the patient on the poverty line is surrounded by a group of individuals whose vitality is at a very low ebb. Our first duty is to protect these individuals.