[1]
[Sidenote: Why are uninhabited rooms shut up?]
The common idea as to uninhabited rooms is, that they may safely be left
with doors, windows, shutters, and chimney-board, all closed--
hermetically sealed if possible--to keep out the dust, it is said; and
that no harm will happen if the room is but opened a short hour before
the inmates are put in. I have often been asked the question for
uninhabited rooms.--But when ought the windows to be opened? The answer
is--When ought they to be shut?
[2]
It is very desirable that the windows in a sick room should be such that
the patient shall, if he can move about, be able to open and shut them
easily himself. In fact, the sick room is very seldom kept aired if this
is not the case--so very few people have any perception of what is a
healthy atmosphere for the sick. The sick man often says, "This room
where I spend 22 hours out of the 24, is fresher than the other where I
only spend 2. Because here I can manage the windows myself." And it is
true.
[3]
[Sidenote: An air-test of essential consequence.]
Dr. Angus Smith's air test, if it could be made of simpler application,
would be invaluable to use in every sleeping and sick room. Just as
without the use of a thermometer no nurse should ever put a patient into
a bath, so should no nurse, or mother, or superintendent, be without the
air test in any ward, nursery, or sleeping-room. If the main function of
a nurse is to maintain the air within the room as fresh as the air
without, without lowering the temperature, then she should always be
provided with a thermometer which indicates the temperature, with an air
test which indicates the organic matter of the air. But to be used, the
latter must be made as simple a little instrument as the former, and
both should be self-registering. The senses of nurses and mothers become
so dulled to foul air, that they are perfectly unconscious of what an
atmosphere they have let their children, patients, or charges, sleep in.
But if the tell-tale air test were to exhibit in the morning, both to
nurses and patients, and to the superior officer going round, what the
atmosphere has been during the night, I question if any greater security
could be afforded against a recurrence of the misdemeanor.
And oh, the crowded national school! where so many children's epidemics
have their origin, what a tale its air-test would tell! We should have
parents saying, and saying rightly, "I will not send my child to that
school, the air-test stands at 'Horrid.'" And the dormitories of our
great boarding schools! Scarlet fever would be no more ascribed to
contagion, but to its right cause, the air-test standing at "Foul."
We should hear no longer of "Mysterious Dispensations," and of "Plague
and Pestilence," being "in God's hands," when, so far as we know, He has
put them into our own. The little air-test would both betray the cause
of these "mysterious pestilences," and call upon us to remedy it.
[4]
With private sick, I think, but certainly with hospital sick, the nurse
should never be satisfied as to the freshness of their atmosphere,
unless she can feel the air gently moving over her face, when still.
But it is often observed that the nurses who make the greatest outcry
against open windows, are those who take the least pains to prevent
dangerous draughts. The door of the patients' room or ward _must_
sometimes stand open to allow of persons passing in and out, or heavy
things being carried in and out. The careful nurse will keep the door
shut while she shuts the windows, and then, and not before, set the door
open, so that a patient may not be left sitting up in bed, perhaps in a
profuse perspiration, directly in the draught between the open door and
window. Neither, of course, should a patient, while being washed, or in
any way exposed, remain in the draught of an open window or door.
[5]
[Sidenote: Don't make your sick room into a sewer.]
But never, never should the possession of this indispensable lid confirm
you in the abominable practice of letting the chamber utensil remain in
a patient's room unemptied, except once in the 24 hours, i.e., when the
bed is made. Yes, impossible as it may appear, I have known the best and
most attentive nurses guilty of this; aye, and have known, too, a
patient afflicted with severe diarrhoea for ten days, and the nurse (a
very good one) not know of it, because the chamber utensil (one with a
lid) was emptied only once in 24 hours, and that by the housemaid who
came in and made the patient's bed every evening. As well might you have
a sewer under the room, or think that in a water-closet the plug need be
pulled up but once a day. Also take care that your _lid_, as well as
your utensil, be always thoroughly rinsed.
If a nurse declines to do these kinds of things for her patient,
"because it is not her business," I should say that nursing was not her
calling. I have seen surgical "sisters," women whose hands were worth to
them two or three guineas a-week, down upon their knees scouring a room
or hut, because they thought it otherwise not fit for their patients to
go into. I am far from wishing nurses to scour. It is a waste of power.
But I do say that these women had the true nurse-calling--the good of
their sick first, and second only the consideration what it was their
"place" to do--and that women who wait for the housemaid to do this, or
for the charwoman to do that, when their patients are suffering, have
not the _making_ of a nurse in them.