[Sidenote:  Open windows.]

I know an intelligent humane house surgeon who makes a practice of keeping the ward windows open.  The physicians and surgeons invariably close them while going their rounds; and the house surgeon very properly as invariably opens them whenever the doctors have turned their backs.

In a little book on nursing, published a short time ago, we are told, that “with proper care it is very seldom that the windows cannot be opened for a few minutes twice in the day to admit fresh air from without.”  I should think not; nor twice in the hour either.  It only shows how little the subject has been considered.

[Sidenote:  What kind of warmth desirable.]

Of all methods of keeping patients warm the very worst certainly is to depend for heat on the breath and bodies of the sick.  I have known a medical officer keep his ward windows hermetically closed, thus exposing the sick to all the dangers of an infected atmosphere, because he was afraid that, by admitting fresh air, the temperature of the ward would be too much lowered.  This is a destructive fallacy.

To attempt to keep a ward warm at the expense of making the sick repeatedly breathe their own hot, humid, putrescing atmosphere is a certain way to delay recovery or to destroy life.

[Sidenote:  Bedrooms almost universally foul.]

Do you ever go into the bed-rooms of any persons of any class, whether they contain one, two, or twenty people, whether they hold sick or well, at night, or before the windows are opened in the morning, and ever find the air anything but unwholesomely close and foul?  And why should it be so?  And of how much importance it is that it should not be so?  During sleep, the human body, even when in health, is far more injured by the influence of foul air than when awake.  Why can’t you keep the air all night, then, as pure as the air without in the rooms you sleep in?  But for this, you must have sufficient outlet for the impure air you make yourselves to go out; sufficient inlet for the pure air from without to come in.  You must have open chimneys, open windows, or ventilators; no close curtains round your beds; no shutters or curtains to your windows, none of the contrivances by which you undermine your own health or destroy the chances of recovery of your sick.[4]

[Sidenote:  When warmth must be most carefully looked to.]

A careful nurse will keep a constant watch over her sick, especially weak, protracted, and collapsed cases, to guard against the effects of the loss of vital heat by the patient himself.  In certain diseased states much less heat is produced than in health; and there is a constant tendency to the decline and ultimate extinction of the vital powers by the call made upon them to sustain the heat of the body.  Cases where this occurs should be watched with the greatest care from hour to hour, I had almost said from minute to minute.  The feet and legs should be examined