no nurse should ever put a patient into
a bath, so should no nurse, or mother, or superintendent be without the
air test in any ward, nursery, or sleeping-room. If the main function of
a nurse is to maintain the air within the room as fresh as the air
without, without lowering the temperature, then she should always be
provided with a thermometer which indicates the temperature, with an air
test which indicates the organic matter of the air. But to be used, the
latter must be made as simple a little instrument as the former, and
both should be self-registering. The senses of nurses and mothers become
so dulled to foul air that they are perfectly unconscious of what an
atmosphere they have let their children, patients, or charges, sleep in.
But if the tell-tale air-test were to exhibit in the morning, both to
nurses and patients and to the superior officer going round, what the
atmosphere has been during the night, I question if any greater security
could be afforded against a recurrence of the misdemeanour.

And oh; the crowded national school! where so many children's epidemics
have their origin, what a tale its air-test would tell! We should have
parents saying, and saying rightly, "I will not send my child to that
school, the air-test stands at 'Horrid.'" And the dormitories of our
great boarding schools! Scarlet fever would be no more ascribed to
contagion, but to its right cause, the air-test standing at "Foul."

We should hear no longer of "Mysterious Dispensations," and of "Plague
and Pestilence," being "in God's hands," when, so far as we know, He has
put them into our own. The little air-test would both betray the cause
of these "mysterious pestilences," and call upon us to remedy it.

[5] With private sick, I think, but certainly with hospital sick, the
nurse should never be satisfied as to the freshness of their atmosphere,
unless she can feel the air gently moving over her face, when still.

But it is often observed that nurses who make the greatest outcry
against open windows are those who take the least pains to prevent
dangerous draughts. The door of the patients' room or ward _must_
sometimes stand open to allow of persons passing in and out, or heavy
things being carried in and out. The careful nurse will keep the door
shut while she shuts the windows, and then, and not before, set the door
open, so that a patient may not be left sitting up in bed, perhaps in a
profuse perspiration, directly in the dr