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

[Sidenote: Almost all patients lie with their faces to the light.] 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 way towards 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 patient's 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.