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Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1920

"Notes on Nursing What It Is, and What It Is Not"


Besides this, the animal exhalations from your inmates saturate your
furniture. And if you never clean your furniture properly, how can your
rooms or wards be anything but musty? Ventilate as you please, the rooms
will never be sweet. Besides this, there is a constant _degradation_, as
it is called, taking place from everything except polished or glazed
articles--_E.g._, in colouring certain green papers arsenic is used. Now
in the very dust even, which is lying about in rooms hung with this kind
of green paper, arsenic has been distinctly detected. You see your dust
is anything but harmless; yet you will let such dust lie about your
ledges for months, your rooms for ever.
Again, the fire fills the room with coal-dust.
[Sidenote: Dirty air from the carpet.]
3. Dirty air coming from the carpet. Above all, take care of the
carpets, that the animal dirt left there by the feet of visitors does
not stay there. Floors, unless the grain is filled up and polished, are
just as bad. The smell from the floor of a school-room or ward, when any
moisture brings out the organic matter by which it is saturated, might
alone be enough to warn us of the mischief that is going on.


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