Notes on Nursing | Page 3

They call it medical or physiological knowledge, fit only for
doctors.
Another objection.

We are constantly told,--"But the circumstances which govern our
children's healths are beyond our control. What can we do with winds?
There is the east wind. Most people can tell before they get up in the
morning whether the wind is in the east."
To this one can answer with more certainty than to the former
objections. Who is it who knows when the wind is in the east? Not the
Highland drover, certainly, exposed to the east wind, but the young
lady who is worn out with the want of exposure to fresh air, to sunlight,
&c. Put the latter under as good sanitary circumstances as the former,
and she too will not know when the wind is in the east.

I. VENTILATION AND WARMING.
[Sidenote: First rule of nursing, to keep the air within as pure as the air
without.]
The very first canon of nursing, the first and the last thing upon which a
nurse's attention must be fixed, the first essential to the patient, without
which all the rest you can do for him is as nothing, with which I had
almost said you may leave all the rest alone, is this: TO KEEP THE
AIR HE BREATHES AS PURE AS THE EXTERNAL AIR,
WITHOUT CHILLING HIM. Yet what is so little attended to? Even
where it is thought of at all, the most extraordinary misconceptions
reign about it. Even in admitting air into the patient's room or ward,
few people ever think, where that air comes from. It may come from a
corridor into which other wards are ventilated, from a hall, always
unaired, always full of the fumes of gas, dinner, of various kinds of
mustiness; from an underground kitchen, sink, washhouse, water-closet,
or even, as I myself have had sorrowful experience, from open sewers
loaded with filth; and with this the patient's room or ward is aired, as it
is called--poisoned, it should rather be said. Always air from the air
without, and that, too, through those windows, through which the air
comes freshest. From a closed court, especially if the wind do not blow
that way, air may come as stagnant as any from a hall or corridor.

Again, a thing I have often seen both in private houses and institutions.
A room remains uninhabited; the fire place is carefully fastened up with
a board; the windows are never opened; probably the shutters are kept
always shut; perhaps some kind of stores are kept in the room; no
breath of fresh air can by possibility enter into that room, nor any ray of
sun. The air is as stagnant, musty, and corrupt as it can by possibility be
made. It is quite ripe to breed small-pox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, or
anything else you please.[2]
Yet the nursery, ward, or sick room adjoining will positively be aired (?)
by having the door opened into that room. Or children will be put into
that room, without previous preparation, to sleep.
A short time ago a man walked into a back-kitchen in Queen square,
and cut the throat of a poor consumptive creature, sitting by the fire.
The murderer did not deny the act, but simply said, "It's all right." Of
course he was mad.
But in our case, the extraordinary thing is that the victim says, "It's all
right," and that we are not mad. Yet, although we "nose" the murderers,
in the musty unaired unsunned room, the scarlet fever which is behind
the door, or the fever and hospital gangrene which are stalking among
the crowded beds of a hospital ward, we say, "It's all right."
[Sidenote: Without chill.]
With a proper supply of windows, and a proper supply of fuel in open
fire places, fresh air is comparatively easy to secure when your patient
or patients are in bed. Never be afraid of open windows then. People
don't catch cold in bed. This is a popular fallacy. With proper
bed-clothes and hot bottles, if necessary, you can always keep a patient
warm in bed, and well ventilate him at the same time.
But a careless nurse, be her rank and education what it may, will stop
up every cranny and keep a hot-house heat when her patient is in
bed,--and, if he is able to get up, leave him comparatively unprotected.
The time when people take cold (and there are many ways of taking
cold, besides a cold in the nose,) is when they first get up after the

two-fold exhaustion of dressing and of having had the skin relaxed by
many hours, perhaps days, in bed, and thereby rendered more incapable
of re-action. Then the same temperature which refreshes the patient in
bed may destroy the patient just risen. And