Note 47 — Chapter II · THE THREE GREAT SHADOWS: SICKNESS, SORROW, SIN

I have spoken of the sick bed as surrounded by loving friends and near of kin. There are sick beds where the situation is quite different,—in the poor wards of hospitals for instance. Nevertheless, the loneliest person is never without certain human relations. It may be the pauper in the next bed, the nurse, or the physician, to whom his behavior will be of lasting meaning.

I would add a word as to the attitude of a person who is threatened with insanity, and who is aware that the disease is approaching. His last conscious act should be to honor the community to which he belongs by voluntarily putting himself out of the way of harming them. Not that the physical harm is itself the principal thing, but that the wish not to harm physically is the sign of his sense of the ethical relation in which he stands to his fellows. Also a person threatened in this way ought to be willing to put himself in the keeping of others, even of strangers, as being no longer himself competent to judge rightly of what shall be done to him. It is true that in accepting the judgment of strangers as a substitute for his own he is taking the risk of being treated with insufficient consideration, and possibly even mistreated. Yet the jeopardy in which he thus puts his future, the sacrificial act he performs, is evidence of mental nobility at the very moment when mental night is about to set in for him.