NEVER SAY DIE.

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 16073, 7 April 1924, Page 2

NEVER SAY DIE.

In one of the wards at a London hospital hangs a card bearing in large type the words—“ Remember the steam-kettle —though up to its neck in hot water, it still continues to sing.” According to a hospital superintendent who writes on the subject in the Daily Mail, that card is worth its weight in radium. After an operation a patient is sometimes inclined to lose heart, hut a reference to the steam-kettle has never failed in its effect. The ward sister calls it “depression’s great antidote,” and it is no exaggeration to say that our death-rate has been lowered by its display. Cheerfulness and courage are the allies of every doctor. Our bodies are like a vast battlefield, consisting of armies of tiny cells which live and work and fight like Dumas’ “Three Musketeers,” “each for all and all for each.” Like armies, these cells can become demoralised and allow the enemy, the disease germ, to win the day. Like armies, too, they 'can snatch victory from defeat. The fighting spirit of a patient is very often the deciding factor in this conflict. The will to live is the supreme enemy of disease. When a doctor sees in his patient resolution taking the place of resignation he knows that very often the corner is turned.

One of the most remarkable cases known to medical science is that of John Aldridge, who lived at Olney, in Buckinghamshire. As a boy he broke his hack. In nine hundred and ninetynine cases out of a thousand such an accident would have proved fatal, but this lad refused to die. He recovered sufficiently to learn the trade of a bootmaker, and later he married and had several children. In every sickroom this truth should lie made known —there is no complaint from which apparently h iraculous recoveries have not taken place. In every doctor’s practice are those whom he proudly calls his “miracles." Courage and cheerfulness are virtues that the ailing cannot spare—to lose them is to die before the time.