Has Hygiene become a "dirty" Word?

At this point in my life hospital visits have become frequent. I walk down clean polished to patent's rooms and after greeting the loved patient, begin to take inventory of the room. In a former life I was a medical technologist, working bacteriology, histology, henatology and as an x-ray technician. Through all these years I never forgot the immortal words my professor for hygiene imparted to us, the young, careless audience. "Ladies and gentlemen," he intoned time and again, followed by, "the fastes way to kill a hapless patient is to infect him/her with the horrible bacterium that you carry with you from your visit to the patient next door." God bless him, he was a great bacriologist, who foretold the discovery of bacterium Helicobacter pylorum and the appearance of retro-viral illnesses and excpriated us to uphold the highest hygienic standards. This was about fifty years ago and he has been proven right, although at that time he had his detractors.

So when I cast my eyes about a hospital room I expect, at the least, cleanliness. I understand that immaculacy is hard to acchieve, but plain clean should be possible. I freeze when my roving eye detects dirty streaks along the baseboard; I recoil when debris like floatsame and jetsame of the ocean collects under beds and I want to strangle the cleaning woman who enters the room of a transplan- patient with a chestwound, bringing along a pail of filthy, gray water which the innocent from a foreign place liberally smears over the floor. I just was trapped in an emergency-room, clean in the middle, with a two foot edge toward the walls in which dust-bunnies seemed to multiply as I was watching. What the hell has happend to American hospitals. When I came to this country forty-seven years ago hospitals were wonderful. I had two babies in different cities and my rooms were crisp, shining and clean. But then.. we also had another thing that is missing now. We had head-nurses, matrons or whatever they were called in different states. Those gals were the hygiene dragons; breathing fire down the backs of cleaning staff and nurses in training. They are gone! Instead we have supervisors sitting in offices removed from the immediate floor. But more of this tomorrow.