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 misdemeanor.

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.

[4]
With private sick, I think, but certainly with hospital sick, the nurse
should never be satisfied as to the freshness of their atmosphere,