Life in the sick-room

by Harriet Martineau

This sensitiveness takes worse directions, however, and inflicts more misery still. It subjects some of us to a scrupulosity, particularly about truth, which brings endless troubles. Every mistake of fact that we happen to know of afflicts us as if we were responsible for it,—and more than it ought if we were so responsible. We tend to an absurd restlessness to set everything right; and of course, above all, what concerns ourselves. If any kind friend pities us too much, and praises us for our patience under sufferings which he supposes to be greater than we are actually enduring, we remonstrate, and explain, as if his sympathy were not good for him and us, at any rate; and as if, having told only truth ourselves, it could matter much how our troubles are rated—whether over or under. We call up images of all who suffer far more than ourselves, and implore him to go and pity them—to honour them and not us. If he smiles and answers, well, he will go and pity and honour them—but he must be sorry for us, too—we smile, also, at our own scrupulosity, though we see in it only a new symptom of disease.

There is yet a worse direction taken by this sensitiveness—both morally and in experience worse. Though our observation of life encourages hope, on the whole, to a boundless extent, both as to affairs and to human character, it teaches some truths about individual characters which are almost too much for our weakened condition. It may be absurd—it may be wrong—to be more afflicted about the faults and failings of the best and most beloved people, than about the vices and gross follies of a lower order of men; but such affliction is, to us, quite inevitable. It is not wholly irrational; for it is a melancholy sight to witness the encroachment of any bad habit of mind in those who should be outgrowing such bad habits, instead of being mastered by them. But we know it to be the common order of things that every man, even the best, carries about with him through life some fault or failing (the shadowy side of his brightest quality, if nothing worse), and that it is the rarest thing in the world to see any strong tendency overcome after the age of resolution, the youthful season of moral heroism, is past: yet, knowing this, it is not the less painful to witness it, with the clearness and strength with which the spectacle offers itself to us, on our post of observation. While working in the world, side by side with those whose doings we now contemplate, we were willing to be deceived in each particular instance; willing to expect that the judgment and action of those we loved and clung to would, in each case, be accordant with their best gifts and graces; and, however often disappointed, we made allowance for the known frailty, and inconsistently hoped it would be better next time. We now see too clearly to be deceived. With the discernment of love, and the power of leisure, we can accurately calculate the allowance to be made—we can precisely measure the obliquity beforehand—and save ourselves at least from disappointment. But there is no solace in this. There is more pain in the proof of the permanent character of faults (permanence including inevitable growth), than in perpetual new evidence of their existence; more sorrow in our prophetic power now than in our credulous weakness of old. The accurate readers of human character may be admired and envied for their infallible knowledge of how men will think and act; but, if they have a true heart-love for those whom they watch, they cannot much enjoy their power. If they have not love, neither can they be happy; so that it requires a penetrative knowledge indeed, into the ways of God as well as man, for such skill to be reconcileable with peace and with our human affections. It is a burdensome knowledge for us to wield, in our weakened condition, and one which it requires an ever-strengthening faith to convert into a nourisher of love.

The faults I have alluded to are such only as are compatible with general sincerity—such as have a character of frailty. Those which include tendencies essentially low—untruth, double-dealing, and selfish policy—assume so disgusting an aspect, when tested by the trying light and amidst the solemn leisure of the sick-room, that it cannot be wrong to follow willingly the irresistible leadings of nature—to dismiss them with loathing, and invite to our arms the simple and heroic sincerity, and the cheerful devotedness to the honour of God and the interests of man, which here assume much of the radiance in which they come back in vision from beyond the grave. If it be true that our moral taste becomes more sensitive in our seclusion, I trust that such sensitiveness has not necessarily any fastidiousness in it, but that its relish of good grows in full proportion to its discipline. I trust that if its disgust deepens as the low and cowardly order of faults are stripped to nakedness, so does its appreciation become more expanded and generous in regard to qualities which befit our heroic and aspiring nature and destination.

As for our best resource under the liabilities I have alluded to, a mere reference will suffice. “Whatsoever things are honest, pure, holy, lovely—to think on these things;” to fill our souls with conceptions of the god-like, so that our sensitiveness may turn in time to a keen apprehension of all that is in affinity with these; this is what we have to do—partly for present solace, and much more for the chance of converting our weakness into power—our mortal discipline into a heavenly habitude.

As for the ordinary and familiar sufferings and dangers of our state, the weariness of life which every one but the physician wonders at, often as it is witnessed; the longing for non-existence, which some pious people, who admit no bodily origin of any mental affection, are very much shocked at; the despair during protracted violent pain, which, however, being dumb, is seldom known at the moment—these cannot be illustrated, nor remedied, by anything that can be said on paper. One can only suggest to the sufferer, and to wise nurses, that in the power of ideas we are furnished with an implement of natural magic which may possibly operate at the most hopeless times. It was in a sort of despair that the father of the lame child, inconsiderately led out too far, gave the boy his stick to ride home on; whereupon the aching foot actually traversed the needful mile without being felt to ache. So the wise nurse may possibly find that a nobler idea than any hope of rest or relief may reanimate a spirit under a far severer pain. And assuredly there are some who could tell how, in the midst of anguish, the briefest suggestion of endurance, the slightest spiritual touch upon deep filial affections, has made a miraculous truce for them with torment and despair.

Observers of the sick think very seriously of their liability to become wedded to their own ways, and engrossed by their own occupations. The fact is as they see it; but it would be happy for us if we had no worse mistakes to apprehend. Those of the sequestered who may re-enter the world will be pretty sure to fall in love with new ways and employments, and to feel a quite sufficient disgust with their own. And if they are never to re-enter life, is it not well for them that they can spend some energies, which would otherwise be corrosive, upon outward things? If their souls are too narrow and purblind to live beyond the bounds of their abode, the best thing for them is to get through the rest of their time as easily as they can, in the way that suits them best. If they are of a higher order, their observers may be assured of two things—that their investment of energy on the ways and occupations of their singular and trying life, is no more than a needful absorption of a power which would otherwise destroy them; and also, that there is no fear of these things becoming indispensable to them or sufficient for them. There are hours, witnessed by no observers, when they find it wise to desist from their most esteemed employments, in condescension to their own weakness, and recognise in this discipline the lesson of the day. There are hours, witnessed by no observers, when the insufficiency of such objects is felt as keenly and pressingly as by the Missionary on his way to the heathen, or the Prime Minister with the interests of nations in the balance before his eyes—or by the drowning man before whose soul life lies pictured in the instant of time which remains to him. This liability, though real, is insignificant and transient, compared with many others.

There is a safeguard against it, too, in our own weakness. There is even, for some, a danger of growing absolutely idle, from a sense of the littleness of what they can do. Formerly they acted on the rule—“not a day without a line,” and now, thrown out of their habit by the absolute incapacity of some days, and disheartened by the small show made by their utmost rational diligence, they give up, and do nothing,—or nothing with regularity. This is a fearful danger. Nowhere are habits of regular employment more necessary than in such a life as ours; and, if we cannot preserve the absolute erectness of rationality,—if we must lean to the error of particularity or of indifference—I have no doubt of the former being the safer of the two;—the least injurious, and the most curable under a change of influences.

One of our most humbling and trying liabilities I do not remember to have seen mentioned anywhere, though it is so common and so deeply felt, that I have no doubt of a response from every sick prisoner (of a considerate mind), whose eye will fall upon this page, I mean our unfitness for doubtful moral enterprise. For doubtful moral enterprise, let it be observed. Where the case is clear, where the right appears to our own eyes to be all on one side, whatever may be on the other, moral enterprise becomes our best medicine; it becomes health and new life to us, as I have elsewhere said, be the responsibility and the immediate consequences to ourselves what they may. But when the case is not so clear, when we are pressed (as all conscientious people, sick or well, strong or feeble, are at times) by antagonist considerations of duty, we cannot, as in our vigorous days, take a part in some clear hour, and strengthen ourselves to bear recurring doubts, and to take cheerfully even conviction of mistake, if experience should prove our conscientious decision to have been unsound. We are not in a condition to bear recurring doubts, or to take cheerfully a conviction of moral mistake. Our duty, in our depressed circumstances, is to avoid such moral disturbance as we have not force to quell. We must, in submission and compassion to our own weakness, evade a decision if we honestly can; and if we cannot, we must accept of help—human help—and proceed upon the opinion of the soundest and most enlightened mind we can appeal to.

If there are any who lift the eyebrows, and shrug the shoulders at the supposition of this case, and declare that there is infallible direction to be found, in all particular cases, in the principles of religion, in answer to prayer, in the guidance of clergy, or the general opinion of mankind, I warn such that they will discover, sooner or later, that there is yet something for them to learn of morals, of the human mind, and of God’s discipline of humanity.

There is no point of which I am more sure than that it is unwise in sick people to keep a diary. Some suppose this task to be one of the duties of the sick-room; whereas I am confident that it is one of the most dangerous of snares. The traveller, moving from scene to scene in high health and spirits, keeps a diary; he looks at it a few years after, and can scarcely believe his own eyes when he sees how many entries there are of his hunger, thirst, and sleepiness. He searches anxiously for a record of some fact, important to the determination of a truth in science—some fact of which he has a vague impression; he cannot find it, but finds in its stead that he was chilly on that morning, or went to bed hungry that night. If it be so in his case, how should the journal of a sick-room avoid becoming a register of the changes of a morbid state? Not only this; but it can scarcely contain anything better. The experiencing and recording instruments themselves, the mind and body, are in a morbid condition, and cannot be trusted to perceive and record faithfully. Moreover, our tendency is, at the best, to an intense and growing self-consciousness, and our efforts should, therefore, be directed to having our minds called out of themselves—to causing our days to pass away as little marked as possible. A diary of public events, a register of books read, or of the opinions of those whose opinions are valuable on the great questions of the time, may be more or less amusing and profitable to keep; but then the rule should be absolute to exclude all mention of ourselves: and my own belief is, that it is wisest to avoid the temptation altogether—to keep clear of all bondage to ourselves and to habit that can be declined.