Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 January 1890 — Light in the Sickroom. [ARTICLE]

Light in the Sickroom.

The custom prevails, despite all our sanitary teachings, that the occupant of the sickroom in the private house should bo kept all hours in a darkened room. Not one time in ten do we enter a sickroom in the daytime to find it blessed with the light of the sun, says the Scientific American. Almost invariably, before we pan get a look at the face of a patient, we are obliged to request that the blinds may be drawn up, in order that the rays of a much greater healer than the most able physician can ever hope to be may be admitted. Too often the eomplian ce with this request reveals the condition of a room, which in a state of darkness, is almost inevitably one of disorder everywhere; foods, medicine,, furniture, bedding misplaced, diist and stray leavings in all directions. In brief, there is nothing so bad as a dark sickroom; it is as if the attendants were anticipating the death of the patient; and, if the reason for it be asked the answer is as inconsistent as the act. The reason usually offered is that the patient cannot bear the light; as though the light could not be cut off from the patient by a curtain or screen, and as though to darken one part of the room it was necessary to darken the whole" of it. The real reason is an 61d superstitious practice, which once prevailed so intensely that the sick, suffering from the most terrible diseases, smallpox, for instance, were shut up in darkness, their beds surrounded with red curtains, during the whole of theii illness. ffr ■ T T ■ - -