(1.) The best way with a pine floor already laid is to close the
joints, plane the surface quite smooth, and then saturate the wood with
beeswax and turpentine, either at once, or after the wood has been
saturated with “drying” linseed oil well rubbed in.
(2.) Enough beeswax should be used to fill up the grain of the wood,
and rubbing with a brush will then smooth the surface. It will be
polished somewhat, but not slippery. The amount of polish depends on
the brushing.
(3.) The surface should be kept clean by using a brush with a cloth
tied over it, and if offensive liquids are spilt, they should be
immediately removed, the surface washed with soap and water, and
immediately dried.
(4.) List slippers, which ought to be part of Hospital furniture,
effectually obviate risk of slipping. It would hardly be possible,
however, to make deal floors as slippery as oak _parquet_, because
the surface (except of very fine deal, such as is used for musical
instruments) never takes so high a polish.
(5.) Dry rubbing, which is done with sand, or with sandstone, is not
well adapted for ordinary sick wards, on account of the dust; unless
it be very carefully done. The rationale of it is to remove a certain
amount of the surface of the floor. It answers very well on board ship.
A certain amount of surface cleaning may be done by rubbing with a
hard short brush; it is, however, defective. The wood becomes in time
saturated with organic matter, and only wants moisture to give off
noxious effluvia.
(6.) Scrubbing is absolutely objectionable, for this reason. In any
schoolroom, reading-room, institute, which is much inhabited, a smell,
while the floor is being scrubbed, is very perceptible, quite different
from that of soap and water. It is the exhalation from the organic
matter which has entered the floor from the feet and breath of the
inhabitants. How much more dangerous this in Hospital Wards need hardly
be said.
There is at Bethanien Hospital, at Berlin, a very admirable flooring,
which would be worth trying in England. The floors throughout are
wood, prepared in the following manner:--The floor is first oiled with
linseed oil, and then rubbed over with a peculiar “laque” varnish, the
technical process of which will be found in the note,[15] and polished,
so as to resemble French polish. Every three years or so the rooms and
wards are successively emptied for a fortnight, when a new flooring is
laid, re-oiled, varnished with the laque varnish, and thoroughly dried.
Every day the floors are wet-rubbed by means of a piece of sacking or
coarse webbing at the end of a long, hard broom, the performer stands
for the performance, also while immediately afterwards, having wrung
the sacking completely dry, she goes over the ground again with the
dry sacking. One, or, in case of the weekly extra wet-rubbing, two dry
rubbings, dry the floor completely in a few minutes from the cessation
of the wet-rubbing, never more than ten minutes. Three or four times a
year the ward floors are thoroughly wetted with water thrown on, and
the floors scrubbed with a long brush. Neither soap, soda, &c., is
used.