[4]
[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.
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