Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Notes on nursing : what it is, and what it is not. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material is part of the Elmer Belt Florence Nightingale collection. The original may be consulted at University of California Libraries.
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![air from Avithout. I should think not; nor twice in tlie hour either. It only shows how little the subject has been considered. vviiat kind of Of all methods of keeping patients warm the very worst certainly warmth jg to depend for heat on the breath and bodies of the sick. I have desirable. known a medical officer keep his ward windows hermetically closed, thus exposing the sick to all the dangers of an infected atmosphere, because he was afraid that, by admitting fre?li air, the temperature of the ward would be too much lowered. This is a destructive fallacy. To attempt to keep a ward warm at the expense of making the sick repeatedly breathe their own hot, humid, putrescing atmosphere is a certain way to delay recovery or to destroy life. 13edrooms Do you ever go into the bed-rooms of any persons of any class, almost univcr- whether they contain one, two, or twenty people, whether they sally foul. }-,q|(J j^j^,]- qj. ^ye}]^ at night, or before the windows are opened in the morning, and ever find the air anything but unwholesomely close and foul ? And why should it be so ? And of how much importance it is that it should not be so? During sleep, the human body, even when in health, is far more injured by the influence of foul air than when awake. Why can't you keep the air all night, then, as pure as the air without in the rooms you sleep in ? But for this, you must have sufiicient outlet for the impure air you make yourselves to go out; sufficient inlet for the pure air from without to come in. .^ou must have open chimneys, open windows, or ventilators; no close curtains round your beds; no shutters or curtains to your windows, none of the contrivances by which you undermine your own health or destroy the chances of recovery of your 8ick.* An air-test of * ^^'- Angus Smith's air test, if it could be made of simpler ap]>lication, would essential ^c invaluable to use in every sleeping and sick room. Just as without the use of consequence. ^ thermometer no nurse should ever put a patient into a bath, so should no nurse, or mother, or superintendent be without the air test in any ward, nursery, or sleeping-room. If the main function of a nurse is to maintain the air within the room as fresh as the air without, without lowering the temperature, then she should always be provided with a thermometer which indicates the temperature, with an air test which indicates the organic matter of the air. But to be used, the latter must be made as simple a little instrument as the former, and both should be self-registering. The senses of nurses and mothers become so dulled to foul air that they are perfectly unconscious of what an atmosphere they have let their children, patients, or charges, sleep in. But if the tell-tale air-test were to exhibit in the morning, both to nurses and patients and to the superior officer going round, what the atmosphere has been during the night, I question if any greater security could be afforded against a recurrence of the misdemeanour. And oh; the crowded national school! where so many children's epidemics have their origin, what a tale its air-test Avould tell 1 We should have parents saying, and saying rightly, I will not send my child to that school, the air-test stands at ' Horrid.' And the dormitories of our great boarding schools ! Scarlet fever would be no more ascribed to contagion, but to its right cause, the air-test standing at Foul. We should hear no longer of Mysterious Dispensations, and of Plague and Pestilence, being in God's hands, Avhen, so far as wc kuo^v. He has put them into our own. The little air-test would both betray the cause of these mysterious pestilences, and call upon us to remedy it.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20452524_0016.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
