sally 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; sufficient inlet for the pure air from without to
come in. You must have open chimneys, open windows, or ventilators; no
close curtains round your beds; no shutters or curtains to your windows,
none of the contrivances by which you undermine your own health or
destroy the chances of recovery of your sick.[3]

[Sidenote: When warmth must be most carefully looked to.]

A careful nurse will keep a constant watch over her sick, especially
weak, protracted, and collapsed cases, to guard against the effects of
the loss of vital heat by the patient himself. In certain diseased
states much less heat is produced than in health; and there is a
constant tendency to the decline and ultimate extinction of the vital
powers by the call made upon them to sustain the heat of the body. Cases
where this occurs should be watched with the greatest care from hour to
hour, I had almost said from minute to minute. The feet and legs should
be examined by the hand from time to time, and whenever a tendency to
chilling is discovered, hot bottles, hot bricks, or warm flannels, with
some warm drink, should be made use of until the temperature is
restored. The fire should be, if necessary, replenished. Patients are
frequently lost in the latter stages of disease from want of attention
to such simple precautions. The nurse may be trusting to the patient's
diet, or to his medicine, or to the occasional dose of stimulant which
she is directed to give him, while the patient is all the while sinking
from want of a little external warmth. Such cases happen at all times,
even during the height of summer. This fatal chill is most apt to occur
towards early morning at the period of the lowest temperature of the
twenty-four hours, and at the time when the effect of the preceding
day's diets