A great deal too much against tea[1] is said by wise people, and a great deal too much of tea is given to the sick by foolish people. When you see the natural and almost universal craving in English sick for their "tea," you cannot but feel that nature knows what she is about. But a little tea or coffee restores them quite as much as a great deal, and a great deal of tea and especially of coffee impairs the little power of digestion they have. Yet a nurse, because she sees how one or two cups of tea or coffee restores her patient, thinks that three or four cups will do twice as much. This is not the case at all; it is however certain that there is nothing yet discovered which is a substitute to the English patient for his cup of tea; he can take it when he can take nothing else, and he often can't take anything else if he has it not. I should be very glad if any of the abusers of tea would point out what to give to an English patient after a sleepless night, instead of tea. If you give it at five or six o'clock in the morning, he may even sometimes fall asleep after it, and get perhaps his only two or three hours' sleep during the twenty-four. At the same time you never should give tea or coffee to the sick, as a rule, after five o'clock in the afternoon. Sleeplessness in the early night is from excitement generally and is
- ↑ It is made a frequent recommendation to persons about to incur great exhaustion, either from the nature of the service, or from their being not in a state fit for it, to eat a piece of bread before they go. I wish the recommenders would themselves try the experiment of substituting a piece of bread for a cup of tea or coffee, or beef tea, as a refresher. They would find it a very poor comfort. When soldiers have to set out fasting on fatiguing duty, when nurses have to go fasting in to their patients, it is a hot restorative they want, and ought to have, before they go, not a cold bit of bread. And dreadful have been the consequences of neglecting this. If they can take a bit of bread with the hot cup of tea, so much the better, but not instead of it. The fact that there is more nourishment in bread than in almost anything else, has probably induced the mistake. That it is a fatal mistake, there is no doubt. It seems, though very little is known on the subject, that what "assimilates" itself directly, and with the least trouble of digestion with the human body, is the best for the above circumstances. Bread requires two or three processes of assimilation, before it becomes like the human body.The almost universal testimony of English men and women who have undergone great fatigue, such as riding long journeys without stopping, or sitting up for several nights in succession, is that they could do it best upon an occasional cup of tea—and nothing else.Let experience, not theory, decide upon this as upon all other things.
