A hand-book of nursing for family and general use.

Date:
[1878], ©1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A hand-book of nursing for family and general use. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    are obstructed ? Over the whole body there are twenty, eight miles of little drain-pipes, with many thousands of openings at the surface of the skin. When this beautiful provision for throwing off impurities and keeping up healthful secretions is made useless by unclean accumula- tions at the mouths of all the little drains, it is obvious that the body must be kept in a debilitated and flabby condition. Bathing is the remedy for this state of things. All children should ba daily washed. Babies in orderly houses are bathed daily; but it is a common and injurious habit even among clean people to leave young children just beyond infancy to their own desires as to their personal cleanliness. A child of ten is not fit to wash himself unless he has been carefully trained daily up to that time in the proper way of taking his bath. To allow a boy as soon as he is old enough to dress himself to do as he pleases, results in his jump- ing out of bed, to which he has gone unwashed, and putting his day-shirt probably over the flannel he has worn at night, and completing his dressing before it occurs to him to wash even his face; and the same is true of girls. The fact is, that in almost all families it is taken for granted that the young people are clean, and so at the very time when they are growing tall and fast, and need every healthy influence, they are left to them- selves in one of the most important matters affecting their health. Daily bathing is quite as necessary for a child of ten as for a baby, and it should be done by the child under instruction, with plenty of soap and brisk rubbing, to produce the full effect. Dashing cold water over the throat and chest strengthens them, and makes the child less susceptible to the effect of damp and cold air. Such habits formed early will stay by a man with very happy results.