Notes on nursing : what it is, and what it is not.

  • Florence Nightingale
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

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 without. I should think not; nor twice in the hour either. It only shows how little the subject has been considered. What 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 desirab e. 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 frei=h air, the temperature of the ward would be too much loweied. 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. Bedrooms Do you ever go into the bed-rooms of any persons of any class, almost univer- whether they contain one, two, or twenty people, whether they sally foul. i^qI^ gi(.], Qj. ^,g||^ jjt 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 sufficient outlet for the impure air you make yourselves to go out; sufficient inlet for the pure air from without to come in. Tou 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 sick.* An air-test of * ^^- Angus Smith's air test, if it could be made of simpler ap]>lication, would essential he 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 war.l, 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. Th<e 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 would tell! 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 lioarding 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, when, so far as w.- know. He has put them into our own. The little air-test would both betray the cause d*f these mysterious pestilences, and call upon us to remedy it.