The doctor at home and nurse's guidebook / edited by George Black.

Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The doctor at home and nurse's guidebook / edited by George Black. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    don’t catch cold in bed. This is a popular fallacy. With proper bed- clothes and hot bottles, if necessary, ; you can always keep a patient I warm in bed and well ventilate ! him at the same time. But a care- ' less nurse, be her rank and educa- I tion what it may, will stop up every j cranny and keep a hot-house heat 1 when her patient is in bed and, if he is able to get up, leave him com- paratively unprotected. The time when people take cold (and there are many ways of taking cold,besides a cold in the nose) is when they first get up after the twofold exhaustion of dressing and of having had the skin relaxed by many hours, per- haps days, in bed and thereby rendered more incapable of reac- tion. Then the same temperature which refreshes the patient in bed may destroy the patient just risen. And common sense will point out that, while purity of air is essential, a temperature must be secured which shall not chill the patient. Otherwise, the best that can be ex- pected will be a feverish reaction. To have the air within as pure as the air without, it is not necessary, as often appears to be thought, to make it as cold. In the afternoon again, without care, the patient whose vital powers have then risen, often finds the room as close and oppressive as he found it cold in the morning. Yet the nurse will be terrified if a window is opened. It is very desirable that the windows in a sick-room should be such as that the patient shall, if he can move about, be able to open and shut them easily himself. In fact, the sick-room is very seldom kept aired if this is not the case—so very few people have any perception of what is a healthy atmosphere for the sick. The sick man often says, 1 This room, where I spend twenty-two hours out of the twenty- four, is fresher than the other where I only spend two. Because here I can manage the windows myself.’ And it is true. In a little book on nursing, published a short time ago, we are told, that ‘ with proper care it is very seldom that the windows cannot be opened for a few minutes twice in the day, to admit fresh air from without.’ I should think not; nor twice in the hour either. Such statements only show how little the subject has been considered.” VENTILATION, HOW EFFECTED In our rooms, and especially in bedrooms, the fire-place should always be left unclosed and the register or damper open for ventila- tion. The windows should pull down from the top and a piece of wire gauze should be fixed along the open space at the top ; or a pane of glass should be perforated with a wheel or rose. All rooms and especially sleeping apartments should be well aired during the day. We may ventilate a room easily by raising the lower window-sash and placing inside the frame a piece of wood three or four inches high and an inch in thickness and reaching from one side of the frame to the other. When the inside sash is brought down to rest on this piece of wood, it is thus raised three or four inches. A current of fresh air then moves inwards and upwards between the sashes and, if a piece of wood or glass sloping up- wards be attached to the top of the lower sash, the current of air will be sent upwards to the ceiling, whence it will diffuse itself through- out the room. Draughts will by this means be avoided. VENTILATION OF BEDROOM See Bedroom, Ventilation of.