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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![Jives, and yet people who are going to marry and to bring more such into the world, will consult nothing but their own convenience as to where they are to live, or how they are to live. With regard to the health of houses where there is a sick person. Don't make it often happens that the sick room is made a ventilating shaft for the your sick- rest of the house. For while the house is kept as close, unaired, ^^^^ i'^to » and dirty as usual, the window of the sick room is kept a little open ^'^^^^i^^^^f always, and the door occasionally. JSTow, there are certain sacrifices ^^.jfyf^, iiouse which a house with one sick person in it does make to that sick person: it ties up its knocker; it lays straw before it in the street. Why can't it keep itself thoroughly clean and unusually well aired, in deference to the sick person ? We must not forget what, in ordinary language, is called Infection. ^' Infection;*—a thing of which people are generally so afraid that they frequently follow the very practice in regard to it which they ought to avoid. Nothing used to be considered so infectious or contagious as small pox; and people not very long ago used to cover up patients with heavy bed clothes, while they kept up large fires and shut the windows. Small pox, of course, under this regime, is very infectious. People are somewhat wiser now in their manage- ment of this disease. They have ventured to cover the patients lightly and to keep the windows open; and we hear much less of the infection of small pox than we used to do. But do people in our days act with more wisdom on the subject of infection in fevers—scarlet fever, measles, &c.—than their forefathers did with small pox ? Does not the popular idea of infection involve that people should take greater care of themselves than of the patient ? that, for instance, it is safer not to be too much with the patient, not to attend too much to his wants ? Perhaps the best illustration of the utter absurdity of this A'iew of duty in attending on infectious diseases is afforded by what was very recently the practice, if it is * Is it not living in a continual mistake to look upon diseases, as we do now. Diseases are as separate entities, which must exist, like cats and dogs 1 instead of looking upon not individuals them as conditions, like a dirty and a clean condition, and just as much under arranged in our own control; or rather as the reactions of kindly nature, against the coudi- classes, like ions in which we have placed ourselves. cats and dogs, I was brought up, both by scientific men and ignorant women, distinctly to but conditions believe that small-pox, for instance, was a thing of which there was once a first growing out of specimen in the world, which went on propagating itself, in a perpetual chain of one another, descent, just as much as that there was a first dog, (or a first pair of dogs), and that small-pox would not begin itself any more than a new dog would begin without there having been a parent dog. Siuce then I have seen with my eyes and smelt with my nose small-pox grow- ing up in first specimens, either in close rooms or in overcrowded wards, where it could not by any possibility have been caught, but must have begun. Nay, more, I have seen diseases begin, grow up, and pass into one another. Now, dogs do not pass into cats. I have seen, for instance, with a little overcrowding, continued fever grow up; and with a little more, typhoid fever; and with a little more, typhus, and all in the same ward or hut. Would it not be far better, truer, and more practical, if we looked upon •lisease in this light] For diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun substantives. c 2](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20452524_0025.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
