Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not

VIII. BED AND BEDDING. [Sidenote: Feverishness a symptom of bedding.] A few words upon bedsteads and bedding; and principally as regards patients who are entirely, or almost entirely, confined to bed. Feverishness is generally supposed to be a symptom of fever--in nine cases out of ten it is a symptom of bedding.[1] The patient has had re-introduced into the body the emanations from himself which day after day and week after week saturate his unaired bedding. How can it be otherwise? Look at the ordinary bed in which a patient lies. [Sidenote: Uncleanliness of ordinary bedding.] If I were looking out for an example in order to show what not to do, I should take the specimen of an ordinary bed in a private house: a wooden bedstead, two or even three mattresses piled up to above the height of a table; a vallance attached to the frame--nothing but a miracle could ever thoroughly dry or air such a bed and bedding. The patient must inevitably alternate between cold damp after his bed is made, and warm damp before, both saturated with organic matter[2], and this from the time the mattresses are put under him till the time they are picked to pieces, if this is ever done. [Sidenote: Air your dirty sheets, not only your clean ones.]