HEALTH 297 



work, mental and physical, that it used to do. The 

 feeling of responsibility, of constant anxiety, is taken off 

 our shoulders and laid on the nurse. Loving members 

 of a family have just to continue their ordinary lives, for 

 mere occupation's sake, and to avoid the reproach of 

 giving way to useless grief, however anxious they may be. 

 Ministering to those we love is too often denied us, and 

 the patient's gentle gratitude, which used to tighten for 

 life the bonds of affection, either does not now exist, or 

 is given to a hard- worked, perhaps overworked, woman 

 who does not want it, and who is here to-day and gone 

 to-morrow. Her services, however excellent and efficient, 

 are given for money, and are and ought to be perfectly 

 different from the tender and devoted services prompted 

 by love. All sensible doctors recognise this. 



George Eliot, whose large-minded philosophy did so 

 much to form the youth of my generation, is not, I am told, 

 much read or, at any rate, not much appreciated now 

 by the young. There, is a splendid passage in ' Janet's 

 Repentance ' which brings home to us the lesson of the 

 sick-room as no words of mine could do. This lesson 

 is sadly missed under the modern condition of things, 

 and the want of it has perhaps caused that rebellion 

 against sorrow and sickness which we so often see now- 

 adays. It is a lesson which those who learnt it young 

 never forget, for it colours the whole of their lives : 



' Day after day, with only short intervals of rest, Janet 

 kept her place in that sad chamber. No wonder the 

 sick-room and the lazaretto have so often been a refuge 

 from the tossings of intellectual doubt a place of repose 

 for the worn and wounded spirit. Here is a duty about 

 which all creeds and all philosophers are at one ; here, at 

 least, the conscience will not be dogged by doubt, the 

 benign impulse will not be checked by adverse theory; 

 here you may begin to act without settling one preliminary 



