But it is often observed that 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.

[6]

[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 the 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.

[7]

[Sidenote:  Health of carriages.]

The health of carriages, especially close carriages, is not of sufficient universal importance to mention here, otherwise than cursorily.  Children, who are always the most delicate test of sanitary conditions, generally cannot enter a close carriage without being sick—­and very lucky for them that it is so.  A close carriage, with the horse-hair cushions and linings always saturated with organic matter, if to this be added the windows up, is one of the most unhealthy of human receptacles.  The idea of taking an airing in it is something preposterous.  Dr. Angus Smith has shown that a crowded railway carriage, which goes at the rate of 30 miles an hour, is as unwholesome as the strong smell of a sewer, or as a back yard in one of the most unhealthy courts off one of the most unhealthy streets in Manchester.