anæmic women take to this absolute rest, and how little they complain of
its monotony. In fact, the use of massage and the battery, with the
frequent comings of the nurse with food, and the doctor's visits, seem
so to fill up the day as to make the treatment less tiresome than might
be supposed. And, besides this, the sense of comfort which is apt to
come about the fifth or sixth day,--the feeling of ease, and the ready
capacity to digest food, and the growing hope of final cure, fed as it
is by present relief,--all conspire to make most patients contented and
tractable.

The intelligent and watchful physician must, of course, know how far to
enforce and when to relax these rules. When it is needful, as it
sometimes is, to prolong the state of rest to two or three months, the
patient may need at the close occupation of some kind, and especially
such as, while it does not tax the eyes, gives the hands something to
do, the patient being, we suppose, by this time able to sit up in bed
during a part of the day.

The moral uses of enforced rest are readily estimated. From a restless
life of irregular hours, and probably endless drugging, from hurtful
sympathy and over-zealous care, the patient passes to an atmosphere of
quiet, to order and control, to the system and care of a thorough nurse,
to an absence of drugs, and to simple diet. The result is always at
first, whatever it may be afterwards, a sense of relief, and a
remarkable and often a quite abrupt disappearance of many of the nervous
symptoms with which we are all of us only too sadly familiar.

All the moral uses of rest and isolation and change of habits are not
obtained by merely insisting on the physical conditions needed to effect
these ends. If the physician has the force of character required to