Notes on Nursing | Page 7

so wise as to refuse to
occupy unhealthily constructed houses, and if Insurance Companies
should ever come to understand their interest so thoroughly as to pay a
Sanitary Surveyor to look after the houses where their clients live,
speculative architects would speedily be brought to their senses. As it is,
they build what pays best. And there are always people foolish enough
to take the houses they build. And if in the course of time the families
die off, as is so often the case, nobody ever thinks of blaming any but
Providence[8] for the result. Ill-informed medical men aid in sustaining
the delusion, by laying the blame on "current contagions." Badly

constructed houses do for the healthy what badly constructed hospitals
do for the sick. Once insure that the air in a house is stagnant, and
sickness is certain to follow.
[Sidenote: Pure water.]
2. Pure water is more generally introduced into houses than it used to
be, thanks to the exertions of the sanitary reformers. Within the last few
years, a large part of London was in the daily habit of using water
polluted by the drainage of its sewers and water closets. This has
happily been remedied. But, in many parts of the country, well water of
a very impure kind is used for domestic purposes. And when epidemic
disease shows itself, persons using such water are almost sure to suffer.
[Sidenote: Drainage.]
3. It would be curious to ascertain by inspection, how many houses in
London are really well drained. Many people would say, surely all or
most of them. But many people have no idea in what good drainage
consists. They think that a sewer in the street, and a pipe leading to it
from the house is good drainage. All the while the sewer may be
nothing but a laboratory from which epidemic disease and ill health is
being distilled into the house. No house with any untrapped drain pipe
communicating immediately with a sewer, whether it be from water
closet, sink, or gully-grate, can ever be healthy. An untrapped sink may
at any time spread fever or pyæmia among the inmates of a palace.
[Sidenote: Sinks.]
The ordinary oblong sink is an abomination. That great surface of stone,
which is always left wet, is always exhaling into the air. I have known
whole houses and hospitals smell of the sink. I have met just as strong a
stream of sewer air coming up the back staircase of a grand London
house from the sink, as I have ever met at Scutari; and I have seen the
rooms in that house all ventilated by the open doors, and the passages
all _un_ventilated by the closed windows, in order that as much of the
sewer air as possible might be conducted into and retained in the
bed-rooms. It is wonderful.

Another great evil in house construction is carrying drains underneath
the house. Such drains are never safe. All house drains should begin
and end outside the walls. Many people will readily admit, as a theory,
the importance of these things. But how few are there who can
intelligently trace disease in their households to such causes! Is it not a
fact, that when scarlet fever, measles, or small-pox appear among the
children, the very first thought which occurs is, "where" the children
can have "caught" the disease? And the parents immediately run over in
their minds all the families with whom they may have been. They never
think of looking at home for the source of the mischief. If a neighbour's
child is seized with small-pox, the first question which occurs is
whether it had been vaccinated. No one would undervalue vaccination;
but it becomes of doubtful benefit to society when it leads people to
look abroad for the source of evils which exist at home.
[Sidenote: Cleanliness.]
4. Without cleanliness, within and without your house, ventilation is
comparatively useless. In certain foul districts of London, poor people
used to object to open their windows and doors because of the foul
smells that came in. Rich people like to have their stables and dunghill
near their houses. But does it ever occur to them that with many
arrangements of this kind it would be safer to keep the windows shut
than open? You cannot have the air of the house pure with dung heaps
under the windows. These are common all over London. And yet
people are surprised that their children, brought up in large "well-aired"
nurseries and bed-rooms suffer from children's epidemics. If they
studied Nature's laws in the matter of children's health, they would not
be so surprised.
There are other ways of having filth inside a house besides having dirt
in heaps. Old papered walls of years' standing, dirty carpets, uncleansed
furniture, are just