Note 22 — VI. TAKING FOOD.
Reading edition · Edition 2
Nurse must have some rule of time about the patient's diet.
Why, because the nurse has not got some food to-day which the patient takes, can the patient wait four hours for food to-day, who could not wait two hours yesterday? Yet this is the only logic one generally hears. On the other hand, the other logic, viz., of the nurse giving a patient a thing because she has got it, is equally fatal. If she happens to have fresh jelly, or fresh fruit, she will frequently give it to the patient half-an-hour after his dinner, or at his dinner, when he cannot possibly eat that and the broth too—or worse still leave it by his bed-side till he is so sickened with the sight of it, that he cannot eat it at all.