1705. Precautions to be Observed Before Entering a Sick Room

1705.    Precautions to be Observed Before Entering a Sick Room, particularly where there is Fever.

Never enter fasting; if it is inconvenient to take refreshment of the ordinary kind, obtain a glass of wine and a cracker.

Do not stand between the patient and the door, if possible. Avoid sitting on or touching the bed-clothes as much as possible, and do not inhale the patient's breath. The hands should always be washed in clean water, if the patient has fever, before leaving the room to touch other people or things.

After visiting a fever patient, etc., change the dress, if possible. As soon as the fever is over, and the patient is convalescent, the dress which has been used by the nurse or attendant should be destroyed if there are no means of fumigation at hand, or it must be boiled in water to which carbolic acid has been added. The same treatment must be applied to the bed-clothes, etc., which have been used.

1706. Onions as a Disinfectant

1706. Onions as a Disinfectant. Onions placed in the room where there is small-pox will blister, and decompose with great rapidity; besides this, they will prevent the spread of the disease. As a disinfectant they have no equal, when properly used; but keep them out of the stomach.

1707. To Prevent Infection

1707. To Prevent Infection. Let communication with the sick by actual contact be as far as possible avoided. Let the patient be lightly covered with the bed-clothes, his chamber freed from all unnecessary articles of furniture, and kept perfectly clean; the sheets and body linens frequently changed and removed from the sick room, as well as all substances producing, or likely to produce, any smell; and above all things let the chamber and the adjoining apartments and passages be completely and freely ventilated by opening opposite doors and windows; for although contagion may be carried by the air, it becomes inert when, instead of being concentrated, it is sufficiently diffused.

1708. Special Preservative Against Infection

1708.    Special Preservative Against Infection. In a lecture delivered in the Royal Institution, Professor Tyndall proved, by a series of interesting experiments, that the surest filter in a contagious atmosphere is cotton wool. " If a physician," said the Professor, "wishes to hold back from the lungs of his patient, or from his own, the germs by which contagious disease is said to be propagated, he will employ a cotton wool respirator. In the crowded dwellings of the London poor, where the isolation of the sick is difficult, if not impossible, the noxious air around the patient may by this simple means be restored to practical purity. Thus filtered, attendants may breathe the air unharmed, for it is exceedingly probable that the germs which lodge in the air-passages, and which, at their leisure, can work their way across the mucous membrane, are those which sow in the body epidemic disease. If this be so, such disease may be warded off by filters of cotton wool."