[1]
[Sidenote: Curious deductions from an excessive death rate.]

Upon this fact the most wonderful deductions have been strung. For a
long time an announcement something like the following has been going
the round of the papers:--"More than 25,000 children die every year in
London under 10 years of age; therefore we want a Children's Hospital."
This spring there was a prospectus issued, and divers other means taken
to this effect:--"There is a great want of sanitary knowledge in women;
therefore we want a Women's Hospital." Now, both the above facts are too
sadly true. But what is the deduction? The causes of the enormous child
mortality are perfectly well known; they are chiefly want of
cleanliness, want of ventilation, want of whitewashing; in one word,
defective _household_ hygiene. The remedies are just as well known; and
among them is certainly not the establishment of a Child's Hospital.
This may be a want; just as there may be a want of hospital room for
adults. But the Registrar-General would certainly never think of giving
us as a cause for the high rate of child mortality in (say) Liverpool
that there was not sufficient hospital room for children; nor would he
urge upon us, as a remedy, to found an hospital for them.

Again, women, and the best women, are wofully deficient in sanitary
knowledge; although it is to women that we must look, first and last,
for its application, as far as _household_ hygiene is concerned. But who
would ever think of citing the institution of a Women's Hospital as the
way to cure this want? We have it, indeed, upon very high authority
that there is some fear lest hospitals, as they have been _hitherto_,
may not have generally increased, rather than diminished, the rate of
mortality--especially of child mortality.

I. VENTILATION AND WARMING.

[Sidenote: First rule of nursing, to keep the air within as pure as the
air without.]

The very first canon of nursing, the first and the last thing upon which
a nurse's attention must be fixed, the first essential to a patient,
without which all the rest you can do for him is as nothing, with which
I had almost said you may leave all the rest alone, is this: TO KEEP THE
AIR HE BREATHES AS PURE AS THE EXTERNAL AIR, WITHOUT CHILLING HIM. Yet
what is so little attended, to? Even where it is thought of at all, the
most extraordinary misconceptions reign about it. Even in admitting air
into the patient's room or ward, few people eve