y the emanations from himself which day after
day and week after week saturate his unaired bedding. How can it be
otherwise? Look at the ordinary bed in which a patient lies.

[Sidenote: Uncleanliness of ordinary bedding.]

If I were looking out for an example in order to show what _not_ to do,
I should take the specimen of an ordinary bed in a private house: a
wooden bedstead, two or even three mattresses piled up to above the
height of a table; a vallance attached to the frame--nothing but a
miracle could ever thoroughly dry or air such a bed and bedding. The
patient must inevitably alternate between cold damp after his bed is
made, and warm damp before, both saturated with organic matter,[27] and
this from the time the mattresses are put under him till the time they
are picked to pieces, if this is ever done.

[Sidenote: Air your dirty sheets, not only your clean ones.]

If you consider that an adult in health exhales by the lungs and skin in
the twenty-four hours three pints at least of moisture, loaded with
organic matter ready to enter into putrefaction; that in sickness the
quantity is often greatly increased, the quality is always more
noxious--just ask yourself next where does all this moisture go to?
Chiefly into the bedding, because it cannot go anywhere else. And it
stays there; because, except perhaps a weekly change of sheets, scarcely
any other airing is attempted. A nurse will be careful to fidgetiness
about airing the clean sheets from clean damp, but airing the dirty
sheets from noxious damp will never even occur to her. Besides this, the
most dangerous effluvia we know of are from the excreta of the
sick--these are placed, at least temporarily, where they must throw
their effluvia into the under side of the bed, and the space under the
bed is never aired; it cannot be, with our arrangements. Must not such a
bed be always saturated, and be always the means of re-introducing into
the system of the unfortunate patient who lies in it, that
excrementitious matter to eliminate which from the body nature had
expressly appointed the disease?

My heart always sinks within me when I hear the good house-wife, of
every class, say, "I assure you the bed has been well slept in," and I
can only hope it is not true. What? is the bed already saturated with
somebody else's damp before my patient comes to exhale into it his own
damp? Has it not had a single chance to be aired? No, not one. "It has
been slept in eve