[Sidenote:  Don’t make your sickroom into a ventilating shaft for the whole house.]

With regard to the health of houses where there is a sick person, it often happens that the sick room is made a ventilating shaft for the rest of the house.  For while the house is kept as close, unaired, and dirty as usual, the window of the sick room is kept a little open always, and the door occasionally.  Now, there are certain sacrifices which a house with one sick person in it does make to that sick person:  it ties up its knocker; it lays straw before it in the street.  Why can’t it keep itself thoroughly clean and unusually well aired, in deference to the sick person?

[Sidenote:  Infection.]

We must not forget what, in ordinary language, is called “Infection;"[4]—­a thing of which people are generally so afraid that they frequently follow the very practice in regard to it which they ought to avoid.  Nothing used to be considered so infectious or contagious as small-pox; and people not very long ago used to cover up patients with heavy bed clothes, while they kept up large fires and shut the windows.  Small-pox, of course, under this regime, is very “infectious.”  People are somewhat wiser now in their management of this disease.  They have ventured to cover the patients lightly and to keep the windows open; and we hear much less of the “infection” of small-pox than we used to do.  But do people in our days act with more wisdom on the subject of “infection” in fevers—­scarlet fever, measles, &c.—­than their forefathers did with small-pox?  Does not the popular idea of “infection” involve that people should take greater care of themselves than of the patient? that, for instance, it is safer not to be too much with the patient, not to attend too much to his wants?  Perhaps the best illustration of the utter absurdity of this view of duty in attending on “infectious” diseases is afforded by what was very recently the practice, if it is not so even now, in some of the European lazarets—­in which the plague-patient used to be condemned to the horrors of filth, overcrowding, and want of ventilation, while the medical attendant was ordered to examine the patient’s tongue through an opera-glass and to toss him a lancet to open his abscesses with?

True nursing ignores infection, except to prevent it.  Cleanliness and fresh air from open windows, with unremitting attention to the patient, are the only defence a true nurse either asks or needs.

Wise and humane management of the patient is the best safeguard against infection.

[Sidenote:  Why must children have measles, &c.,]

There are not a few popular opinions, in regard to which it is useful at times to ask a question or two.  For example, it is commonly thought that children must have what are commonly called “children’s epidemics,” “current contagions,” &c., in other words, that they are born to have measles, hooping-cough, perhaps even scarlet fever, just as they are born to cut their teeth, if they live.