But how much more extraordinary is it that, whereas what we might call the coxcombries of education—­e.g., the elements of astronomy—­are now taught to every school-girl, neither mothers of families of any class, nor school-mistresses of any class, nor nurses of children, nor nurses of hospitals, are taught anything about those laws which God has assigned to the relations of our bodies with the world in which He has put them.  In other words, the laws which make these bodies, into which He has put our minds, healthy or unhealthy organs of those minds, are all but unlearnt.  Not but that these laws—­the laws of life—­are in a certain measure understood, but not even mothers think it worth their while to study them—­to study how to give their children healthy existences.  They call it medical or physiological knowledge, fit only for doctors.

Another objection.

We are constantly told,—­“But the circumstances which govern our children’s healths are beyond our control.  What can we do with winds?  There is the east wind.  Most people can tell before they get up in the morning whether the wind is in the east.”

To this one can answer with more certainty than to the former objections.  Who is it who knows when the wind is in the east?  Not the Highland drover, certainly, exposed to the east wind, but the young lady who is worn out with the want of exposure to fresh air, to sunlight, &c.  Put the latter under as good sanitary circumstances as the former, and she too will not know when the wind is in the east.

I. VENTILATION AND WARMING.

[Sidenote:  First rule of nursing, to keep the air within as pure as the air without.]

The very first canon of nursing, the first and the last thing upon which a nurse’s attention must be fixed, the first essential to the patient, without which all the rest you can do for him is as nothing, with which I had almost said you may leave all the rest alone, is this:  To keep the air he breathes as pure as the external air, without chilling him.  Yet what is so little attended to?  Even where it is thought of at all, the most extraordinary misconceptions reign about it.  Even in admitting air into the patient’s room or ward, few people ever think, where that air comes from.  It may come from a corridor into which other wards are ventilated, from a hall, always unaired, always full of the fumes of gas, dinner, of various kinds of mustiness; from an underground kitchen, sink, washhouse, water-closet, or even, as I myself have had sorrowful experience, from open sewers loaded with filth; and with this the patient’s room or ward is aired, as it is called—­poisoned, it should rather be said.  Always air from the air without, and that, too, through those windows, through which the air comes freshest.  From a closed court, especially if the wind do not blow that way, air may come as stagnant as any from a hall or corridor.