Notes on Nursing | Page 8

as ready sources of impurity to the air as if there were
a dung-heap in the basement. People are so unaccustomed from
education and habits to consider how to make a home healthy, that they
either never think of it at all, and take every disease as a matter of
course, to be "resigned to" when it comes "as from the hand of

Providence;" or if they ever entertain the idea of preserving the health
of their household as a duty, they are very apt to commit all kinds of
"negligences and ignorances" in performing it.
[Sidenote: Light.]
5. A dark house is always an unhealthy house, always an ill-aired house,
always a dirty house. Want of light stops growth, and promotes
scrofula, rickets, &c., among the children.
People lose their health in a dark house, and if they get ill they cannot
get well again in it. More will be said about this farther on.
[Sidenote: Three common errors in managing the health of houses.]
Three out of many "negligences and ignorances" in managing the
health of houses generally, I will here mention as specimens--1. That
the female head in charge of any building does not think it necessary to
visit every hole and corner of it every day. How can she expect those
who are under her to be more careful to maintain her house in a healthy
condition than she who is in charge of it?--2. That it is not considered
essential to air, to sun, and to clean rooms while uninhabited; which is
simply ignoring the first elementary notion of sanitary things, and
laying the ground ready for all kinds of diseases.--3. That the window,
and one window, is considered enough to air a room. Have you never
observed that any room without a fire-place is always close? And, if
you have a fire-place, would you cram it up not only with a
chimney-board, but perhaps with a great wisp of brown paper, in the
throat of the chimney--to prevent the soot from coming down, you say?
If your chimney is foul, sweep it; but don't expect that you can ever air
a room with only one aperture; don't suppose that to shut up a room is
the way to keep it clean. It is the best way to foul the room and all that
is in it. Don't imagine that if you, who are in charge, don't look to all
these things yourself, those under you will be more careful than you are.
It appears as if the part of a mistress now is to complain of her servants,
and to accept their excuses--not to show them how there need be
neither complaints made nor excuses.

[Sidenote: Head in charge must see to House Hygiene, not do it
herself.]
But again, to look to all these things yourself does not mean to do them
yourself. "I always open the windows," the head in charge often says. If
you do it, it is by so much the better, certainly, than if it were not done
at all. But can you not insure that it is done when not done by yourself?
Can you insure that it is not undone when your back is turned? This is
what being "in charge" means. And a very important meaning it is, too.
The former only implies that just what you can do with your own hands
is done. The latter that what ought to be done is always done.
[Sidenote: Does God think of these things so seriously?]
And now, you think these things trifles, or at least exaggerated. But
what you "think" or what I "think" matters little. Let us see what God
thinks of them. God always justifies His ways. While we are thinking,
He has been teaching. I have known cases of hospital pyæmia quite as
severe in handsome private houses as in any of the worst hospitals, and
from the same cause, viz., foul air. Yet nobody learnt the lesson.
Nobody learnt anything at all from it. They went on
_thinking_--thinking that the sufferer had scratched his thumb, or that it
was singular that "all the servants" had "whitlows," or that something
was "much about this year; there is always sickness in our house." This
is a favourite mode of thought--leading not to inquire what is the
uniform cause of these general "whitlows," but to stifle all inquiry. In
what sense is "sickness" being "always there," a justification of its
being "there" at all?
[Sidenote: How does He carry out His laws?]
[Sidenote: How does He teach His laws?]
I will tell you what was the cause of this hospital pyæmia being in that
large private house. It was that the sewer air from an ill-placed sink was
carefully conducted into all the rooms by sedulously opening