It is a curious thing to observe how almost all patients lie with their faces turned to the light, exactly as plants always make their faces turned to the light; a patient will even complain that it gives him pain “lying on that side.”  “Then why do you lie on that side?” He does not know,—­but we do.  It is because it is the side towards the window.  A fashionable physician has recently published in a government report that he always turns his patients’ faces from the light.  Yes, but nature is stronger than fashionable physicians, and depend upon it she turns the faces back and towards such light as she can get.  Walk through the wards of a hospital, remember the bed sides of private patients you have seen, and count how many sick you ever saw lying with their faces towards the wall.

X. CLEANLINESS OF ROOMS AND WALLS.

[Sidenote:  Cleanliness of carpets and furniture.]

It cannot be necessary to tell a nurse that she should be clean, or that she should keep her patient clean,—­seeing that the greater part of nursing consists in preserving cleanliness.  No ventilation can freshen a room or ward where the most scrupulous cleanliness is not observed.  Unless the wind be blowing through the windows at the rate of twenty miles an hour, dusty carpets, dirty wainscots, musty curtains and furniture, will infallibly produce a close smell.  I have lived in a large and expensively furnished London house, where the only constant inmate in two very lofty rooms, with opposite windows, was myself, and yet, owing to the abovementioned dirty circumstances, no opening of windows could ever keep those rooms free from closeness; but the carpet and curtains having been turned out of the rooms altogether, they became instantly as fresh as could be wished.  It is pure nonsense to say that in London a room cannot be kept clean.  Many of our hospitals show the exact reverse.

[Sidenote:  Dust never removed now.]

But no particle of dust is ever or can ever be removed or really got rid of by the present system of dusting.  Dusting in these days means nothing but flapping the dust from one part of a room on to another with doors and windows closed.  What you do it for I cannot think.  You had much better leave the dust alone, if you are not going to take it away altogether.  For from the time a room begins to be a room up to the time when it ceases to be one, no one atom of dust ever actually leaves its precincts.  Tidying a room means nothing now but removing a thing from one place, which it has kept clean for itself, on to another and a dirtier one.[28] Flapping by way of cleaning is only admissible in the case of pictures, or anything made of paper.  The only way I know to remove dust, the plague of all lovers of fresh air, is to wipe everything with a damp cloth.  And all furniture ought to be so made as that it may be wiped with a damp cloth without injury to itself, and so polished as that it may be damped without injury to others.  To dust, as it is now practised, truly means to distribute dust more equally over a room.