But in our case, the 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.