It is always easier to follow a beaten path than to break one's way through untrodden forests. It is easier to walk after we "learn how," and learning how is simply doing it over a...
Hyperesthesia is abnormal sensitiveness to stimulation. Anesthesia is loss, either temporary or permanent, of any of the senses. Perversion is morbid alteration of function which m...
Hand in hand with clear thinking goes reliable memory. But so many of us have it not, and feel its need so strongly that we shall consider for a moment some means of training it. W...
But the mind of man knows two distinct conditions of activity--the conscious and the unconscious. Mind is not always wide awake. We recognize what we call the conscious mind as the...
Nothing is known to us until it has been transmitted to the mind by the senses. The nerves of special sense, of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, the temperature sense ("hot or...
The nurse who demands of herself that she perceive accurately paves the way for accurate, deft service in her profession. There are constant means at hand for training in the art....
At this time of our study it will suffice to say that in delirium and in insanity, which we might very broadly call a prolonged delirium, the toxic brain becomes a house in disorde...
Feeling Cannot Be Separated from Thinking.--Emotion we found the constant accompaniment of every other mental activity. It is first on the stage of consciousness and, in the normal...
Suppose that when you first enter the ward you are wishing with all your heart you had never decided to become a probationer. Perhaps the white screen and its possible meaning has...
I am passing the open door of a bake-shop, and a pervading odor fills the air. I think "hot rolls," because my organ of smell--the nose--has received a stimulus which it transmits...
The mind can be as definitely developed and strengthened as the body. The man who has suffered for years an organic disease will never have the same force as he who has never been...
Attention naturally follows interest. It can, however, be held by will to the unappealing, with the usual result of transforming it into a thing of interest. One of the laws of the...
So the good nurse will not consider her work done when she has diverted mental processes into channels of co-operation. When the patient, who is capable of reasoning, knows the why...
One almost universal condition found in illness is hypersuggestability. Here is the nurse's despair and her hope. Suggestion may come from without or from within. When from within,...
Life would be a very simple proposition if the mental machinery always worked right. But this is peculiarly subject to damage both from without and from within. From without it may...
After the first few years of life practically nothing enters consciousness that cannot by some likeness or contrast or kinship be connected with something already there. Were it no...
Our points of view are very frequently merely hereditary or acquired prejudices, hence altogether emotional rather than rational. We only with great difficulty see things through a...
The point of view of any individual depends upon temperament, present conditions--mental and physical--and the aim of the life. That is, it depends upon his inherited tendencies pl...
No mind retains consciously everything that has ever impressed it. It is necessary that it put aside what ceases to be of importance or value and make way for new impressions. We f...
The normal mind reasons clearly with the best data at hand to results that will stand the test of conformity to reality; the normal mind uses reason and feeling, guided by reasonab...
The nurse of the future will not be merely a handmaiden to care for the sick body by deftly carrying out the doctor's orders. She will do this almost automatically as a matter of c...