Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 April 1881 — Improvement in the Sick-Room. [ARTICLE]

Improvement in the Sick-Room.

The changes of our time have been as marked in the sick-room as in the railway car or the telegraph office. The frightful doses of calomel and senna and castor oil, so common a century ago, are almost unknown. We wonder how our ancestors survived the administered drugs, when the disease was not fatal. In attacks of typhoid fever it was customary to bleed patients, and to starve them also, in order to loosen the hold of the fever on the system. It is now thought important to retain all the blood and enrich it by nutritious food, that the strength may be sustained against the severe dram made on the system by fever. Cold water used to be refused to patients parched with thirst, though they begged for it piteously. It is now given freely, as nature demands it. Flowers, also, used to be banished rigidly from sick-rooms, as they were thought to consume oxygen by night, and mrke the air unwholesome for the patient. But tests applied in large greenhouses have found the air as pure and rich in oxygen in the morning as at midday, and it may be hoped this superstition will be abandoned. A little beauty afid fragrance in the sick-cliam-ber may keep up cheerfulness and hope, which often are better antidotes than drugs. A touno lowa farmer writes to his friends in the East who have been urging him to marry that he cannot keep a wife on thin wind and pond water and sleeping on a rail fence.