Part 13 (2/2)

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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 cus.h.i.+ons 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.

[8] G.o.d lays down certain physical laws. Upon His carrying out such laws depends our responsibility (that much abused word), for how could we have any responsibility for actions, the results of which we could not foresee--which would be the case if the carrying out of His laws were _not_ certain. Yet we seem to be continually expecting that He will work a miracle--i.e. break His own laws expressly to relieve us of responsibility.

[9]

[Sidenote: Servants' rooms.]

I must say a word about servants' bed-rooms. From the way they are built, but oftener from the way they are kept, and from no intelligent inspection whatever being exercised over them, they are almost invariably dens of foul air, and the ”servants' health” suffers in an ”unaccountable” (?) way, even in the country. For I am by no means speaking only of London houses, where too often servants are put to live under the ground and over the roof. But in a country ”_mansion_,” which was really a ”mansion,” (not after the fas.h.i.+on of advertis.e.m.e.nts), I have known three maids who slept in the same room ill of scarlet fever.

”How catching it is,” was of course the remark. One look at the room, one smell of the room, was quite enough. It was no longer ”unaccountable.” The room was not a small one; it was up stairs, and it had two large windows--but nearly every one of the neglects enumerated above was there.

[10]

[Sidenote: Diseases are not individuals arranged in cla.s.ses, like cats and dogs, but conditions growing out of one another.]

Is it not living in a continual mistake to look upon diseases, as we do now, as separate ent.i.ties, which _must_ exist, like cats and dogs?

instead of looking upon them as conditions, like a dirty and a clean condition, and just as much under our own control; or rather as the reactions of kindly nature, against the conditions in which we have placed ourselves.

I was brought up, both by scientific men and ignorant women, distinctly to believe that small-pox, for instance, was a thing of which there was once a first specimen in the world, which went on propagating itself, in a perpetual chain of descent, just as much as that there was a first dog, (or a first pair of dogs), and that small-pox would not begin itself any more than a new dog would begin without there having been a parent dog.

Since then I have seen with my eyes and smelt with my nose small-pox growing up in first specimens, either in close rooms or in overcrowded wards, where it could not by any possibility have been ”caught,” but must have begun.

Nay, more, I have seen diseases begin, grow up, and pa.s.s into one another. Now, dogs do not pa.s.s into cats.

I have seen, for instance, with a little overcrowding, continued fever grow up; and with a little more, typhoid fever; and with a little more, typhus, and all in the same ward or hut.

Would it not be far better, truer, and more practical, if we looked upon disease in this light?

For diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun substantives.

[11]

[Sidenote: Lingering smell of paint a want of care.]

That excellent paper, the _Builder_, mentions the lingering of the smell of paint for a month about a house as a proof of want of ventilation.

Certainly--and, where there are ample windows to open, and these are never opened to get rid of the smell of paint, it is a proof of want of management in using the means of ventilation. Of course the smell will then remain for months. Why should it go?

<script>