Every nurse ought to be careful to wash her hands very frequently during the day.  If her face too, so much the better.

One word as to cleanliness merely as cleanliness.

[Sidenote:  Steaming and rubbing the skin.]

Compare the dirtiness of the water in which you have washed when it is cold without soap, cold with soap, hot with soap.  You will find the first has hardly removed any dirt at all, the second a little more, the third a great deal more.  But hold your hand over a cup of hot water for a minute or two, and then, by merely rubbing with the finger, you will bring off flakes of dirt or dirty skin.  After a vapour bath you may peel your whole self clean in this way.  What I mean is, that by simply washing or sponging with water you do not really clean your skin.  Take a rough towel, dip one corner in very hot water,—­if a little spirit be added to it it will be more effectual,—­and then rub as if you were rubbing the towel into your skin with your fingers.  The black flakes which will come off will convince you that you were not clean before, however much soap and water you have used.  These flakes are what require removing.  And you can really keep yourself cleaner with a tumbler of hot water and a rough towel and rubbing, than with a whole apparatus of bath and soap and sponge, without rubbing.  It is quite nonsense to say that anybody need be dirty.  Patients have been kept as clean by these means on a long voyage, when a basin full of water could not be afforded, and when they could not be moved out of their berths, as if all the appurtenances of home had been at hand.

Washing, however, with a large quantity of water has quite other effects than those of mere cleanliness.  The skin absorbs the water and becomes softer and more perspirable.  To wash with soap and soft water is, therefore, desirable from other points of view than that of cleanliness.

XII.  CHATTERING HOPES AND ADVICES.

[Sidenote:  Advising the sick.]

The sick man to his advisers.

“My advisers!  Their name is legion. * * * Somehow or other, it seems a provision of the universal destinies, that every man, woman, and child should consider him, her, or itself privileged especially to advise me.  Why?  That is precisely what I want to know.”  And this is what I have to say to them.  I have been advised to go to every place extant in and out of England—­to take every kind of exercise by every kind of cart, carriage—­yes, and even swing (!) and dumb-bell (!) in existence; to imbibe every different kind of stimulus that ever has been invented.  And this when those best fitted to know, viz., medical men, after long and close attendance, had declared any journey out of the question, had prohibited any kind of motion whatever, had closely laid down the diet and drink.  What would my advisers say, were they the medical attendants, and I the patient left their advice, and took the casual adviser’s?  But the singularity in Legion’s mind is this:  it never occurs to him that everybody else is doing the same thing, and that I the patient must perforce say, in sheer self-defence, like Rosalind, “I could not do with all.”