Oak floors, polished; furniture also; impervious glazed walls and
ceilings, or frequent lime-washing.
All that has been so justly said as to the necessity of impervious
polished floors and walls for hospitals applies tenfold to lying-in
institutions, where the decomposition of dead organic matter, and the
re-composition of new organic matter, must be constantly going on.
It is this, in fact, which makes lying-in institutions so dangerous to
the inmates.
And it may literally be said that the danger increases as the square of
the number of in cases.
Lying-in ‘infection’ is a very good illustration of what ‘infection’
really means, since _parturition_ is not infectious or ‘contagious.’
The excessive susceptibility of lying-in women to poisonous emanations,
the excessively poisonous emanations from lying-in women—these
constitute a hospital influence on lying-in cases brought together in
institutions, second to no influence we know of exercised by the most
‘infectious’ or ‘contagious’ disease.
The death-rate is not much higher among women lying-in at home in large
towns than in healthy districts. Therefore the agglomeration of cases
together and want of management required to meet it must bear the blame.
As to floors, the well-laid polished floor is _a sine quâ non_ in a
lying-in institution, where, with every care, slops, blood, and the
like, must frequently be spilt on the floor.