Volume 1

Notes on nursing : what it is, and what it is not / By Florence Nightingale.

  • Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1910.
Date:
[1859?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Notes on nursing : what it is, and what it is not / By Florence Nightingale. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

    19/88 (page 15)
    UEALTll Oi' JIOUSES. Without these, no house can be healthy. And it will be unbealtliy just in proportion as they are deficient. 1. To have pure air, your liouse must be so constructed as that the Pure air. outer atmosphere shall iiud its way with ease to every corner of it. House architects hardly ever consider this. The object in building a liouse is to ohtain the largest interest for the money, not to save doctors*' bills to the tenants. But, if tenants should ever become so wise as to refuse to occupy unhealthily constructed houses, and if Insurance Companies should ever come to understand their interest so thoroughly as to pay a Sanitary Surveyor to look after the houses where their clients live, speculative arcbitects would speedily be brought to thejr senses. As it is, they build what pays best. And there are always people foolish enough to take the houses they build. And if in the course of time the families die off, as is so often the case, nobody ever thinks of blaming any but Providence* for the result. Ill-informed medical men aid in sustaining the delusion, by laying the blame on current contagions. Badly constructed houses do for the healthy what badly constructed hospitals do for the sick. Once insure that the air in a house ia stagnant, and sickness is certain to follow. 2. Pure water is more generally introduced into houses than it Pure water, used to be, thanks to the exertions of the sanitary reformers. Within the last few years, a large part of London was in the daily babit of using water polluted by the drainage of its sewers and water closets. This has happily been remedied. But, in many parts of the country, well water of a very impure kind is used for -iomestic purposes. And when epidemic disease shows itself, persons using such water are almost sure to suffer. 3. It would be curious to ascertain by inspection, how many Drainage, houses in London are really well drained. Many people would say, surely all or most of them. But many people have no idea in what good drainage consists. They think that a sewer in tlie street, and a pipe leading to it from the house is good drainage. All the while the sewer may be nothing but a laboratory from which epidemic disease and ill health is being distilled into the house. No house with any untrapped drain pipe communicating immediately with a sewer, whether it be from water closet, sink, or gully-grate, can ever be healthy. An untrapped sink may at any time spread fever or pyaemia among the inmntes of a palace. The ordinary oblong sink is an abomination. That great surface Sinks, ot stone, which is always left wet, is always exhaling into the air. I liave known whole houses and hospitals smell of the sink. I have met just as strong a stream of sewer air coming up the back stair- case of a grand London house from the sink, as I have ever met at • God lays down certain pliysical laws. Upon His carrying out such laws depends our responsibility (that much abused word), for how could we have any responsibility for actions, the results of which we could not foresee—wliich would be the case it the carrying out of His laws were mU certain. Yet we seem to be continuallv expecting that Ho will work a miracle-i. break His own laws e.vpre-'sly to relieve us of re.«pon.><i))i!ii,y.