All of these bandages will probably be popped into the autoclave to be sterilized -- but I'd still feel better if they hadn't started out on the floor.

Could she be putting dry plaster of Paris on those strips in order to later make casts from the soaked rolls?

Is that nurse rolling bandages from a pile of bandage stock on the floor? It looks like her hands and the floor have powder on them. Maybe it's sterilizing powder.

1. Make sure you throw the bandages on the floor before rolling them to ensure they stay sanitary !

The Gamble House in Pasadena, CA is a historical house commissioned in 1908 [the year of this photo] as a winter residence by David Gamble, son of the co-founder of Proctor & Gamble in Cincinnati. I am a docent there and tour visitors always remark about the low lighting intensity throughout the house. [Brief editorial ahem -- Procter, not Proctor.]

Although Edison's incandescent lamp predated the house by almost 30 years, there remained concern about the long-term negative effects of the eye's exposure to the so-called "electric rays." Clear glass bulbs - rated at a blazing 15 watts - are enclosed by frosted glass or by a beautiful, custom-designed art glass chandelier or sconce. That is, except in the kitchen - a staff area where the residents rarely ventured - where the same bulbs are unshielded and in direct view.

Talk abut sanitation! No wonder so many women had their babies at home.

I was born (many) decades ago at Massachusetts Lying-In. I just learned this morning that the Lying-In part meant maternity.

Sterile floors make sterile bandages. Doh!

The building at 17th street and Second avenue is now a condominium called Rutherford Estates at Stuyvesant Square. There is a plaque on the front that says that in 1902, 60 percent of the Manhattan children who were born in hospitals were birthed at Lying In.

Just be glad that irrigation device is gravity fed and not hooked to a pressure pump.YEOW

There is absolutely nothing in this room that gives me comfort nor confidence. Had I been of birthing age, I think I would have remained the spinster aunt.

Great joke! She's actually making cannoli at the table (all the flour was a give-away) and he's about to fill the injector with ricotta cheese. Once I saw the cheesecake pan with an EZ-fill chute, on the lower shelf to his right, I knew. They've got some cleverly designed baking devices there.

Can someone explain the tissue on the floor? Is she a nurse or a baker? It looks like she is carefully rolling the tissue up from off the floor in flour. With the park bench seating, this room makes me uncomfortable.

Two of my children were born there. Modes of childbirth have changed enormously since 1908. Today, there is a sharp division between those getting Caesarian sections, who experience NASA-like technology in a setting reminiscent of the one in this photo, and those having "natural" childbirth, for whom lots of monitors and beeping devices are provided, but in a setting that is much softer.

I am stunned that the bandages she is rolling appear to all have been on the floor at some point.

At least there's plenty of light -- boy, is there plenty of light. How many bulbs are in that fixture? It looks like about twenty-five.

(But that, um, irrigation device scares me.)