Notes on Nursing | Page 4

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 common sense will point out,
that, while purity of air is essential, a temperature must be secured
which shall not chill the patient. Otherwise the best that can be
expected will be a feverish re-action.
To have the air within as pure as the air without, it is not necessary, as
often appears to be thought, to make it as cold.
In the afternoon again, without care, the patient whose vital powers
have then risen often finds the room as close and oppressive as he
found it cold in the morning. Yet the nurse will be terrified, if a
window is opened.[2]
[Sidenote: Open windows.]
I know an intelligent humane house surgeon who makes a practice of
keeping the ward windows open. The physicians and surgeons
invariably close them while going their rounds; and the house surgeon
very properly as invariably opens them whenever the doctors have
turned their backs.
In a little book on nursing, published a short time ago, we are told, that,
"with proper care it is very seldom that the windows cannot be opened
for a few minutes twice in the day to admit fresh air from without." I
should think not; nor twice in the hour either. It only shows how little
the subject has been considered.
[Sidenote: What kind of warmth desirable.]
Of all methods of keeping patients warm the very worst certainly is to
depend for heat on the breath and bodies of the sick. I have known a
medical officer keep his ward windows hermetically closed. Thus
exposing the sick to all the dangers of an infected atmosphere, because
he was afraid that, by admitting fresh air, the temperature of the ward

would be too much lowered. This is a destructive fallacy.
To attempt to keep a ward warm at the expense of making the sick
repeatedly breathe their own hot, humid, putrescing atmosphere is a
certain way to delay recovery or to destroy life.
[Sidenote: Bedrooms almost universally foul.]
Do you ever go into the bed-rooms of any persons of any class, whether
they contain one, two, or twenty people, whether they hold sick or well,
at night, or before the windows are opened in the morning, and ever
find the air anything but unwholesomely close and foul? And why
should it be so? And of how much importance it is that it should not be
so? During sleep, the human body, even when in health, is far more
injured by the influence of foul air than when awake. Why can't you
keep the air all night, then, as pure as the air without in the rooms you
sleep in? But for this, you must have sufficient outlet for the impure air
you make yourselves to go out; sufficient inlet for the pure air from
without to come in. You must have open chimneys, open windows, or
ventilators; no close curtains round your beds; no shutters or curtains to
your windows, none of the contrivances by which you undermine your
own health or destroy the chances of recovery of your sick.[3]
[Sidenote: When warmth must be most carefully looked to.]
A careful nurse will keep a constant watch over her sick, especially
weak, protracted, and collapsed cases, to guard against the effects of
the loss of vital heat by the patient himself. In certain diseased states
much less