The orders ran somewhat in this fashion: “Chicken soup for twenty—beef tea for forty—tea and toast for fifty.” A certain Mr. Jones had expressed his abhorrence of tea and toast, so I asked the nurse why he gave it to him.
He answered that the diet was ordered by the surgeon, but Jones said he would not touch it, for he never ate slops, and so he had eaten nothing for two days.
“Well, what does he wish?”
“The doctor says tea and toast” (reiterating his first remark).
“Did you tell the doctor he would not eat it?”
“I told the doctor, and he told the doctor.”
“Perhaps he did not hear, or understand you.”
“Yes, he did. He only said that he wanted that man particularly to have tea and toast, though I told him Jones threw it up regularly; so he put it down again, and said Jones was out of his head, and Jones says the doctor is a fool.”
My remark upon this was that Jones could not be so very much out of his head—an observation that entailed subsequent consequences. The habit so common among physicians when dealing with uneducated people, of insisting upon particular kinds of diet, irrespective of the patient’s tastes, was a peculiar grievance that no complaint during four years ever remedied.
“Sufficient for the Day,” &c.