A few moments later she jerked the thermometer from my mouth, glanced at
it hurriedly and then entered a record upon a chart suspended from the
head of my bed. Then calling one of the male attendants, she instructed
him to fill the tub preparatory to giving me an ice bath. This attendant
went to the corner of the room from whence he secured a bath tub on
wheels, which he pushed over to the side of my bed. The tub was already
partly filled with water, and I afterward learned that owing to the
laziness and filthiness of the attendants, the same water was often used
over and over again for the different typhoid patients. I observed that
this attendant, who was otherwise called an orderly, was about as
ignorant and degraded a specimen of humanity as a much boasted
civilization could possibly breed.
He was about six feet tall, round-shouldered, knock-kneed, and weighed
about two hundred pounds of flabby flesh, mostly covered by filthy
garments. His head was pyramidal in shape, and covered by a mass of
unkempt red hair. He had practically no forehead. His eyes were dull and
bloodshot. His nose was flat and bent to one side, and his whole face
was covered with pimples. His mouth was wide and beastly, and filled
with tobacco. His mustache was irregular, and dyed almost to the roots
by tobacco juice. His breath was odoriferous with fumes of whiskey,
cigarettes, and foul stomach disorders, causing a poisonous stench to
pollute the surrounding atmosphere. One could not look upon him without
a feeling of sickening disgust.
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