Page:Rural Hygiene - Florence Nightingale.pdf/19

 Parlour.—Danger of uninhabited rooms without sunlight and fresh air, and with blinds pulled down—genteel parlour chilling to the bone. Clean papers not to be put over dirty ones. Tea-leaves for sweeping carpets; but better to have no carpets nailed down.

(2a) —The Skin and How to Keep the Body Clean.—Simple account of functions of skin. Beauty dependent on healthy state of skin, not on a fine hat. Use of the skin as throwing out waste matter. Compare the village child with a beautiful clean skin—such a child as any mother would long to kiss—with the leper of the Scriptures, a loathsome object, the skin all sores, so repulsive to others, so painful to himself, that, as a miracle, he asks to be made "clean," and the gracious answer comes: "I will: be thou clean."

Then show that the difference between the child and the leper is just the difference between a healthy and unhealthy skin. The difference between a clean skin and a dirty skin is the difference between health and sickness.

Enter fully but not learnedly into the work of the pores. Dangers of a choked skin. The body choked and poisoned by its own waste substances might be compared to a house whence nothing was thrown away—the scullery choked with old fat, potato peelings, &c., the drain from the sink stopped up, the grate full of cinders, the floor of dust, the table of grease and crumbs. None of these things were dirty at first: it is the keeping them that makes the house uninhabitable.