Page:An Old English Home and Its Dependencies.djvu/263

Rh now a recognized truth that, for the sick, the nurse is more important than the doctor. He sent his medicines, but how could he be sure that they were taken, or taken regularly? The whole system of nursing was as rude as the whole system of drainage. It was all happy-go-lucky. The story is well known of the doctor sending a bottle of mixture to a sick man, with the direction on it, "Before taken to be well shaken"—and finding on his arrival that the attendant had shaken up the patient pretty vigorously before administering the draught. The following story is perfectly true. A kind-hearted village doctor, finding that a poor woman he was attending needed nourishing food, got his wife to send her a jelly. Some time after he went to the cottage, found the ground-floor room untenanted, but heard a trampling, groaning, and struggling going on upstairs. He accordingly ascended to the bedroom, to see a labouring man sitting on the bed, holding up the sick woman's head, whilst another labouring man—her