ss nurse, be her rank and education what it may, will stop
up every cranny and keep a hot-house heat when her patient is in bed,--
and, if he is able to get up, leave him comparatively unprotected. The
time when people take cold (and there are many ways of taking cold,
besides a cold in the nose,) is when they first get up after the
two-fold exhaustion of dressing and of having had the skin relaxed by
many hours, perhaps days, in bed, and thereby rendered more incapable of
re-action. Then the same temperature which refreshes the patient in bed
may destroy the patient just risen. And common sense will point out,
that, while purity of air is essential, a temperature must 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.[2]

[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 univer