e, I have observed, upon having a high-priced tea. This is called
extravagant. But these women are "extravagant" in nothing else. And they
are right in this. Real tea-leaf tea alone contains the restorative they
want; which is not to be found in sloe-leaf tea.

The mistresses of houses, who cannot even go over their own house once a
day, are incapable of judging for these women. For they are incapable
themselves, to all appearance, of the spirit of arrangement (no small
task) necessary for managing a large ward or dairy.

VIII. BED AND BEDDING.

[Sidenote: Feverishness a symptom of bedding.]

A few words upon bedsteads and bedding; and principally as regards
patients who are entirely, or almost entirely, confined to bed.

Feverishness is generally supposed to be a symptom of fever--in nine
cases out of ten it is a symptom of bedding.[1] The patient has had
re-introduced into the body 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[2], 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 e