Undoubtedly I have seen a few people who were ennobled by long sickness, but far more often the result is to cultivate self-love and selfishness and to take away by slow degrees the healthful mastery which all human beings should retain over their own emotions and wants.
There is one fatal addition to the weight which tends to destroy women who suffer in the way I have described.

It is the self-sacrificing love and over-careful sympathy of a mother, a sister, or some other devoted relative.

Nothing is more curious, nothing more sad and pitiful, than these partnerships between the sick and selfish and the sound and over-loving.

By slow but sure degrees the healthy life is absorbed by the sick life, in a manner more or less injurious to both, until, sometimes too late for remedy, the growth of the evil is seen by others.

Usually the individual withdrawn from wholesome duties to minister to the caprices of hysterical sensitiveness is the person of a household who feels most for the invalid, and who for this very reason suffers the most.