ust 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[3].

[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.

To attempt to keep a ward warm at the expense of making the sick
repeatedly breathe their own hot, humid, putrescing atmosphere is a
certain way to delay recovery or to destroy life.

[Sidenote: Bedrooms almost universally foul.]

Do you ever go into the bed-rooms of any persons of any class, whether
they contain one, two, or twenty people, whether they hold sick or well,
at night, or before the windows are opened in the morning, and ever find
the air anything but unwholesomely close and foul? And why should it be
so? And of how much importance it is that it should not be so? During
sleep, the human body, even when in health, is far more injured by the
influence of foul air than when awake. Why can't you keep the air all
night, then, as pure as the air without in the rooms you sleep in? But
for this, you must have sufficient outlet for the impure air you make
yourselves to go out; su