ry night."

[Sidenote: Iron spring bedstead the best.]

[Sidenote: Comfort and cleanliness of _two_ beds.]

The only way of really nursing a real patient is to have an _iron_
bedstead, with rheocline springs, which are permeable by the air up to
the very mattress (no vallance, of course), the mattress to be a thin
hair one; the bed to be not above 3-1/2 feet wide. If the patient be
entirely confined to his bed, there should be _two_ such bedsteads; each
bed to be "made" with mattress, sheets, blankets, &c., complete--the
patient to pass twelve hours in each bed; on no account to carry his
sheets with him. The whole of the bedding to be hung up to air for each
intermediate twelve hours. Of course there are many cases where this
cannot be done at all--many more where only an approach to it can be
made. I am indicating the ideal of nursing, and what I have actually had
done. But about the kind of bedstead there can be no doubt, whether
there be one or two provided.

[Sidenote: Bed not to be too wide.]

There is a prejudice in favour of a wide bed--I believe it to be a
prejudice. All the refreshment of moving a patient from one side to the
other of his bed is far more effectually secured by putting him into a
fresh bed; and a patient who is really very ill does not stray far in
bed. But it is said there is no room to put a tray down on a narrow bed.
No good nurse will ever put a tray on a bed at all. If the patient can
turn on his side, he will eat more comfortably from a bed-side table;
and on no account whatever should a bed ever be higher than a sofa.
Otherwise the patient feels himself "out of humanity's reach"; he can
get at nothing for himself: he can move nothing for himself. If the
patient cannot turn, a table over the bed is a better thing. I need
hardly say that a patient's bed should never have its side against the
wall. The nurse must be able to get easily to both sides the bed, and to
reach easily every part of the patient without stretching--a thing
impossible if the bed be either too wide or too high.

[Sidenote: Bed not to be too high.]

When I see a patient in a room nine or ten feet high upon a bed between
four and five feet high, with his head, when he is sitting up in bed,
actually within two or three feet of the ceiling, I ask myself, is this
expressly planned to produce that peculiarly distressing feeling common
to the sick, viz., as if the walls and ceiling were closing in upon
them, and they