Notes on Nursing | Page 3

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.
FOOTNOTES:

[1] [Sidenote: Curious deductions from an excessive death rate.]
Upon this fact the most wonderful deductions have been strung. For a
long time an announcement something like the following has been
going the round of the papers:--"More than 25,000 children die every
year in London under 10 years of age; therefore we want a Children's
Hospital." This spring there was a prospectus issued, and divers other
means taken to this effect:--"There is a great want of sanitary
knowledge in women; therefore we want a Women's Hospital." Now,
both the above facts are too sadly true. But what is the deduction? The
causes of the enormous child mortality are perfectly well known; they
are chiefly want of cleanliness, want of ventilation, want of
whitewashing; in one word, defective household hygiene. The remedies
are just as well known; and among them is certainly not the
establishment of a Child's Hospital. This may be a want; just as there
may be a want of hospital room for adults. But the Registrar-General
would certainly never think of giving us as a cause for the high rate of
child mortality in (say) Liverpool that there was not sufficient hospital
room for children; nor would he urge upon us, as a remedy, to found an
hospital for them.
Again, women, and the best women, are wofully deficient in sanitary
knowledge; although it is to women that we must look, first and last,
for its application, as far as household hygiene is concerned. But who
would ever think of citing the institution of a Women's Hospital as the
way to cure this want? We have it, indeed, upon very high authority
that there is some fear lest hospitals, as they have been _hitherto_, may
not have generally increased, rather than diminished, the rate of
mortality--especially of child mortality.

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 a 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 fireplace 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.[1]
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