[Sidenote:  Iron spring bedstead the best.]

[Sidenote:  Comfort and cleanliness of two beds.]

The only way of really nursing a real patient is to have an iron bedstead, with rheocline springs, which are permeable by the air up to the very mattress (no vallance, of course), the mattress to be a thin hair one; the bed to be not above 3-1/2 feet wide.  If the patient be entirely confined to his bed, there should be two such bedsteads; each bed to be “made” with mattress, sheets, blankets, &c., complete—­the patient to pass twelve hours in each bed; on no account to carry his sheets with him.  The whole of the bedding to be hung up to air for each intermediate twelve hours.  Of course there are many cases where this cannot be done at all—­many more where only an approach to it can be made.  I am indicating the ideal of nursing, and what I have actually had done.  But about the kind of bedstead there can be no doubt, whether there be one or two provided.

[Sidenote:  Bed not to be too wide.]

There is a prejudice in favour of a wide bed—­I believe it to be a prejudice.  All the refreshment of moving a patient from one side to the other of his bed is far more effectually secured by putting him into a fresh bed; and a patient who is really very ill does not stray far in bed.  But it is said there is no room to put a tray down on a narrow bed.  No good nurse will ever put a tray on a bed at all.  If the patient can turn on his side, he will eat more comfortably from a bed-side table; and on no account whatever should a bed ever be higher than a sofa.  Otherwise the patient feels himself “out of humanity’s reach”; he can get at nothing for himself:  he can move nothing for himself.  If the patient cannot turn, a table over the bed is a better thing.  I need hardly say that a patient’s bed should never have its side against the wall.  The nurse must be able to get easily to both sides the bed, and to reach easily every part of the patient without stretching—­a thing impossible if the bed be either too wide or too high.

[Sidenote:  Bed not to be too high.]

When I see a patient in a room nine or ten feet high upon a bed between four and five feet high, with his head, when he is sitting up in bed, actually within two or three feet of the ceiling, I ask myself, is this expressly planned to produce that peculiarly distressing feeling common to the sick, viz., as if the walls and ceiling were closing in upon them, and they becoming sandwiches between floor and ceiling, which imagination is not, indeed, here so far from the truth?  If, over and above this, the window stops short of the ceiling, then the patient’s head may literally be raised above the stratum of fresh air, even when the window is open.  Can human perversity any farther go, in unmaking the process of restoration which God has made?  The fact is, that the heads of sleepers or of sick should never be higher than the throat of the chimney, which ensures their being in the current of best air.  And we will not suppose it possible that you have closed your chimney with a chimney-board.