And it
stays there; because, except perhaps a weekly change of sheets, scarcely
any other airing is attempted. A nurse will be careful to fidgetiness
about airing the clean sheets from clean damp, but airing the dirty
sheets from noxious damp will never even occur to her. Besides this, the
most dangerous effluvia we know of are from the excreta of the
sick--these are placed, at least temporarily, where they must throw
their effluvia into the under side of the bed, and the space under the
bed is never aired; it cannot be, with our arrangements. Must not such a
bed be always saturated, and be always the means of re-introducing into
the system of the unfortunate patient who lies in it, that
excrementitious matter to eliminate which from the body nature had
expressly appointed the disease?
My heart always sinks within me when I hear the good house-wife, of
every class, say, "I assure you the bed has been well slept in," and I
can only hope it is not true. What? is the bed already saturated with
somebody else's damp before my patient comes to exhale into it his own
damp? Has it not had a single chance to be aired? No, not one.
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