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 is exhausted.
Generally speaking, you may expect that weak patients will suffer cold
much more in the morning than in the evening. The vital powers are much
lower. If they are feverish at night, with burning hands and feet, they
are almost sure to be chilly and shivering in the morning. But nurses
are very fond of heating the foot-warmer at night, and of neglecting it
in the morning, when they are busy. I should reverse the matter.
All these things require common sense and care. Yet perhaps in no one
single thing is so little common sense shewn, in all ranks, as in
nursing.[5]
[Sidenote: Cold air not ventilation, nor fresh air a method of chill.]
The extraordinary confusion between cold and ventilation, in the minds
of even well educated people, illustrates this. To make a room cold is
by no means necessarily to ventilate it.
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