The Mother and Her ChildSadler, William S. (William Samuel)
Science
The Mother and Her Child
Sadler, William S. (William Samuel)
Child care; Infants -- Care; Infants -- Health and hygiene; Pregnancy
Visitors should never be allowed in the sick room during the height of
a disease, and during convalescence not more than one visitor should
be allowed at one time, and the visit then should be only two or three
minutes in length. The order and the quietness and the system of the
sick room should be perfect. Visitors and loitering members of the
family do no good and they may do much harm to the recuperating
nervous system of the child.
LOCATION OF THE SICK ROOM
In these days of high rents, we realize that the greater per cent of
our readers are living in apartments and homes just big enough
conveniently to care for the family during health, and while it would
be pleasant and convenient to have a spare room or an attic chamber
that could be used in case of illness, it is the exception rather than
the rule that the families to whom sickness comes have these extra
apartments. When a contagious or an infectious disease comes to the
family, it is of great importance that the sick child be isolated,
preferably on another floor, from that used by the immediate family.
Those living in homes, more than likely can fix up a room on the attic
floor for the isolation, and those living in apartments may put the
sick child in one end of the apartment, while they inhabit the other
end. One family under my observation not long ago had a child stricken
with the measles. In the same apartment there lived a puny baby not
quite two years old. Coming as it did in February, the mother of the
child was apprehensive, fearing that measles would leave a severe
bronchitis which might mean the death of the already too-delicate
baby. She was instructed to move the baby's bed to the sun parlor in
the front of the flat, while the boy with the measles was put in the
parents' room in the rear end of the flat. A sheet was suspended in
the middle of the hall leading from the living-room to the bedrooms.
Door knobs were disinfected daily, a caretaker was put in charge of
the measles patient, the mother very frequently was compelled to go
back and administer a treatment, but each time she donned a large
apron and completely covered her hair with a towel, she administered
the treatment, took off her wrappings, thoroughly washed her face and
hands--disinfected them--and returned to her baby in the front part of
the house.
At night this mother slept on the floor on springs and mattress in the
living-room, and to that home the measles came and departed, and the
baby did not get them at all, so perfect was the isolation, so
vigilant the disinfection, and so scrupulous the care to prevent
contamination. So you see from this one instance that it is altogether
possible to make isolation complete even on the same floor. But, mind
you, the dishes that the lad ate from were all kept in his room. Food
was brought to the sheet and there the caretaker held her dishes while
the cook poured or lifted the food from her clean dishes to the dishes
the caretaker brought from the sick room.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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