| <Saturday Review, 2 December 1871, 711-2>
| <IN SICKNESS.>
| <Eliza Lynn Linton>
| <etext downloaded from Project Gutenberg with thanks>
| Life not being holiday-making throughout, we have to allow for the bad
| half-hours that must come to us; and, if we are wise, we make
| provision to pass them with as little annoyance as possible. And of
| all the bad half-hours to which we are destined, those to be spent in
| sickness need the greatest amount of care to render them endurable.
| Without going to the length of Michelet's favourite theory, which sees
| in every woman nothing but an invalid more or less severely afflicted
| according to individual temperament, but always under the influence of
| diseased nerves and controlled by sickly fancies, there is no doubt
| that women suffer very much more than men; while their patience under
| physical ailments is one of the traditional graces with which they are
| credited. Where men fume and fret at the interruption to their lives
| brought about by a fit of illness, calculating anxiously the loss they
| are sustaining during the forced inaction of their convalescence,
| women submit resignedly, and make the best of the inevitable. With
| that clear sense of Fate characteristic of them, they do not fight
| against the evil which they know has to be borne, but wisely try to
| lighten it by such wiles and arts as are open to them, and set
| themselves to adorn the cross they must endure. One thing indeed,
| makes invalidism less terrible to them than to men; and that is their
| ability to perform their home duties, if not quite as efficiently as
| when they are up and about, yet well enough for all practical purposes
| in the conduct of the family. The woman who gives her mind to it can
| keep her house in smooth working gear by dictation from her sick
| couch; and what she cannot actively overlook she can arrange. So far
| this removes the main cause of irritation with which the man must
| battle in the best way he can, when his business comes to a
| stand-still; or is given up into the hands of but a makeshift kind of
| substitute taken at the best; while he is laid on his back undergoing
| many things from doctors for the good of science and the final
| settling of doubtful pathological points.
| Another reason why women are more patient than men during sickness is
| that they can amuse themselves better. One gets tired of reading all
| day long with the aching eyes and weary brain of weakness; yet how few
| things a man can do to amuse himself without too great an effort, and
| without being dependent on others! But women have a thousand pretty
| little devices for whiling away the heavy hours. They can vary their
| finger-work almost infinitely, and they find real pleasure in a new
| stitch or a stripe of a different colour and design from the last. In
| the contempt in which needlework in all its forms is held by the
| advanced class of women, its use during the period of convalescence,
| when it helps the lagging time as nothing else can, is forgotten. Yet
| it is no bad wisdom to remember that the day of sickness will probably
| come some time to us all; and to lay in stores of potential interest
| and cheerfulness against that day is a not unworthy use of power.
| Certain it is that this greater diversity of small, unexciting,
| unfatiguing occupations enables women to bear a tedious illness with
| comparative patience, and helps to keep them more cheerful than men.
| But when the time shall have come for the perfect development of the
| androgynous creature, who is as yet only in the pupal state of her
| existence, women will have lost these two great helps. Workers outside
| the home like their husbands and brothers, like them they will fume
| and fret when they are prevented from following their bread-winning
| avocations; calculations of the actual money loss they are sustaining
| coming in to aggravate their bodily pains. And, as the needle is
| looked on as one of the many symbols of feminine degradation, in the
| good time coming there will be none of that pretty trifling with silks
| and ribbons which may be very absurd by the side of important work,
| but which is invaluable as an invalid's pastime. Consequently, what
| with the anguish of knowing that her profession is neglected, and what
| with the unenlivened tedium of her days, sickness will be a formidable
| thing to women of the androgynous type ~~ and to the men belonging to
| them.
| Again, care and tact are required to rob sickness of its more painful
| features, and to render it not too distressing to the home companions.
| A real woman, with her instincts properly developed ~~ among them the
| instinct of admiration ~~ knows how to render 
| even invalidism beautiful;
| and indeed, with her power of improving occasions, she is never more
| charming than as an invalid or a convalescent. There is a certain
| refined beauty about her more seductive than the robuster bloom of
| health. Her whole being seems purified. The coarser elements of
| humanity are obscured, passions are at rest, and all those fretful,
| anxious strivings, which probably afflict her when in the full swing
| of society, are put away as if they had never been. She is forced to
| let life glide, and her own mind follows the course of the quieter
| flow. She knows too how to make herself bewitching by the art which is
| not artifice so much as the highest point to which her natural
| excellences can be brought. If the radiance of health has gone, she
| has the sweeter, subtler loveliness of fragility; if her diamonds are
| laid aside, and all that glory of dress which does so much for women
| is perforce abandoned, the long, loose folds of falling drapery, with
| their antique grace, perhaps suit her better, and the fresh flowers on
| her table may be more suggestive and delightful than artificial ones
| in her hair.
| Many a drifting husband has been brought back to his first enthusiasm
| by the illness of a wife who knew how to turn evil things into good,
| and to extract a charm even out of suffering. It is a turn of the
| kaleidoscope; a recombination of the same elements but in a new
| pattern and with fresh loveliness; whereas the androgynous woman, with
| her business worries and her honest, if impolitic, self-surrender to
| hideous flannel wraps and all the uglinesses of a sick room crudely
| pronounced, would have added a terror to disease which probably would
| have quenched his waning love for ever. For the androgynous woman
| despises every approach to coquetry, as she despises all the other
| insignia of feminine servitude. It is not part of her life's duties to
| make herself pleasing to men; and they must take her as they find her.
| Where the true woman contrives a beauty and creates a grace out of her
| very misfortune, the androgynous holds to the doctrine of spades and
| the value of the unvarnished truth. Where the one gives a little
| thought to the most becoming colour of her ribbon or the best
| arrangement of her draperies, the other pushes the tangled locks off
| her face anyhow, and makes herself an amorphous bundle of brown and
| lemon colour. Her sole wish is to get the bad time over. How it would
| be best got over does not trouble her; and to beautify the inherently
| unlovely is beyond her skill to compass. Hence her hours of sickness
| go by in ugliness and idle fretting; while the true woman finds
| graceful work to do that enlivens their monotony, and in the
| continuance of her home duties loses the galling sense of loss from
| which the other suffers.
| In sickness too, who but women can nurse? Men make good nurses enough
| out in the bush, where nothing better can be had; and a Californian
| <p> 'pardner' </p> is tender enough in his 
| uncouth way to his mate stricken
| down with fever in the shanty, when he comes in at meal-times and
| administers quinine and brick tea with horny hands bleeding from cuts
| and begrimed with mud. But this is not nursing in the woman's sense.
| To be sure the strength of men makes them often of value about an
| invalid. They can lift and carry as women cannot; and the want of a
| few nights' sleep does not make them hysterical. Still they are
| nowhere as nurses, compared with women; and the best of them are not
| up to the thoughtful cares and pleasant attentions which, as medical
| men know, are half the battle in recovery. And this is work which
| suits women. It appeals to their love of power and tenderness
| combined; it gratifies the maternal instinct of protection and
| self-sacrifice; and it pleasantly reverses the usual order of things,
| and gives into their hands Hercules twirling a distaff the wrong way,
| and fettered by the length of his skirts.
| The bread-winning wife knows nothing of all this. To her, sickness in
| her household would be only a degree less destructive than her own
| disablement, if she were called on to nurse. She would not be able to
| leave her office for such unremunerative employment as soothing her
| children's feverish hours or helping her husband over his. She would
| calculate, naturally enough, the difference of cost between hired help
| and her own earnings; and economy as well as inclination would decide
| the question. But the poor fellow left all day long to the
| questionable services of a hired nurse, or to the clumsy honesty of
| some domestic Phyllis less deft than faithful, would be a gainer by
| his wife's presence ~~ granting that she was a real woman and not an
| androgyne ~~ even if he lost the addition to their income 
| which her work
| might bring in; as he would rather, when he came home from his work to
| her sick bed, find her patient and cheerful, making the best of things
| from the woman's point of view and with the woman's power of
| adaptation, than be met with anxious queries as to the progress of
| business; with doubts, fears, perplexities; the office dragged into
| the sick room, and unnecessary annoyance added to unavoidable pain.
| There is a certain kind of woman, sweet always, who yet shows best
| when she is invalided. Cleared for a while from the social tangles
| which perplex and distress the sensitive, she is as if floated into a
| quiet corner where she has time to think and leisure to be her true
| self undisturbed; where she is able too, to give more to her friends,
| if less to the world at large than at other times. And she is always
| to be found. The invalid-couch is the rallying point of the household,
| and even the little children learn to regard it as a place of
| privilege dearer than the stately drawing-room of ordinary times. Her
| friends drop in, sure to find her at home and pleased by their
| coming; and her afternoon teas with her half-dozen chosen intimates
| have a character of their own, æsthetic and delightful; partly owing
| to the quiet and subdued tone that must perforce pervade them, partly
| to the unselfishness that reigns on all sides. <reg orig=”Every one”> 
| Everyone </reg> exerts
| himself to bring her things which may amuse her, and she is loaded
| with presents of a graceful kind ~~ new books, 
| early fruit, and a wealth
| of flowers to which even her poorest friend adds his bunch of violets,
| if nothing else. She is the precious child of her circle, and but for
| her innate sweetness would run a risk of being the spoilt one. Clever
| men come and talk to her, give her cause of thought, and knowledge to
| remember and be made glad by for all time; her lady friends keep her
| abreast of the outside doings of the world and their own especial
| coteries, contributing the dramatic element so dear to the feminine
| mind; <reg orig=”every one”> everyone </reg> tells her all 
| that is afloat on the sea of society,
| but only all that is cheerful ~~ <reg orig=”no one”> no-one </reg> 
| brings her horrors, nor disturbs
| the frail grace of her repose with petty jealousies and tempers. Her
| atmosphere is pure and serene, and the dainty loveliness of her
| surroundings lends its charm to the rest.
| To her husband she is even more beautiful than in the early days; and
| all men feel for her that chivalrous kind of tenderness and homage
| which the true woman alone excites. The womanly invalid, gentle,
| cheerful, full of interest for others, active in mind if prostrate in
| body, sympathetic and patient, is for the time the queen of her
| circle, loved and ministered to by all; and when she goes to Cannes or
| San Remo to escape the cruelty of the English winter, she carries with
| her a freight of good wishes and regrets, and leaves a blank which
| nothing can fill up until she returns with the summer roses to take
| her place once more as the popular woman of her society.