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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![How does He teach His laws? Physical dege- neration in families. Its causes. Senanta' rooms. crockery was rinsed wiih dirty water;—it was that the beds were never properly shaken, aired, picked to pieces, or changed. It was that the carpets and curtains were always musty;—it was that the furniture was always dusty ; it was that the papered walls were satu- rated with dirt;—it was that the floors were never cleaned;—it was that the uninhabited rooms were never sunned, or cleaned, or aired ; —it was that the cupboards were always reservoirs of foul air;—it was that the windows were always tight shut up at night;—it was that no window was ever systematically opened, even in the day, or that the right window was not opened. A person gasping for air might open a window for himself. But the servants were not taught to open the windows, to shut the doors ; or they opened the windows upon a dank well between high walls, not upon the airier court; or they opened the room doors into the unaired halls and passages, by way of airing the rooms. Now all this is not fancy, but fact. In that handsome house I have known in one summer three cases of hospital pyaemia, one of phlebitis, two of consumptive cough : all the immediate products of foul air. When, in temperate climates, a house is more unhealthy in summer tlian in winter, it is a certain sign of something wrong. Yet nobody learns the lesson. Yes, God always justifies His ways. He is teaching while you are not learning. This poor body loses his finger, that one loses his life. And all from the most easily preventible causes.* The houses of the grandmothers and great grandmothers of this generation, at least the country houses, with front door and back door always standing open, winter and summer, and a thorough draught always blowing through—with all the scrubbing, and clean- ing, and polishing, and scouring which used to go on, the grand- mothers, and still more the ^eat grandmothers, always out of doors and never with a bonnet on except to go to church, these things entirely account for the fact so often seen of a great grandmother, who was a tower of physical vigour descending into a grandmother perhaps a little less vigorous but still sound as a bell and healthy to the core, into a mother languid and confined to her carriage and house, and lastly into a daughter sickly and confined to her bed. For, remember, even with a general decrease of mortality you may often find a race thus degenerating and still oftener a family. You may see poor little feeble washed-out rags, children of a noble stock, suffering morally and physically, throughout their useless, degenerate * I must say a word about servants' bedrooms. From the way they are built, but oftener from the way they are kept, and from no intelligent inspection what- ever being exercised over them, they are almost invariably dens of foul air, and the servants' health suffers in an unaccountable (]) way, even in the country. For I am by no means speaking only of London houses, where too often servants are put to live under the ground and over the roof. But in a country mannion, which was really a mansion, (not after the fashion of advertisements), I have known three maids who slept in the same room ill of scarlet fever. How catching it is, was of course the remark. One look at the room, one smell of the room, was quite enough. It was no longer unaccountable. The room was not a small one; it was up stairs, and it had two large windows—but nearly every one of the neglects enumerated above was there.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20452548_0028.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
