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,[27] 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.
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