VENTILATION

BY

J. C. SHRADER, A. M., M. D.,

OF

THE STATE BOARD OF HEALTH.

Presented at the May meeting, 1889, of the Board and ordered printed.

It is not in the external atmosphere that we must look for the greatest impurities, but in our own houses the blighting, withering curse of foul air is to be found.

The reason cities are so much more healthy than the country, is not because the air in the street is so much more impure, but because the houses are so built together that the vast ocean of air cannot get into and through them, to purify them as it does in the houses in the country.

It is the belief of a very good authority that a family living in the filthiest street in a city, were they careful to have a constant current of air passing through the house night and day, would be more healthy, other things being equal, than a family spending their Winters in the finest house, if kept air-tight in the healthiest location in the city, and their Summer in the country, especially if they were always careful to exclude the night air from their bed

rooms.

Dr. Benjamin Franklin says some people are as much afraid of fresh air as persons in hydrophobia are of fresh water-veritable airophobia. They consider fresh, cool air an enemy, and carefully close every crevice through which it might be admitted, whereas they should look upon fresh water as a friend, and to even sleep with an open window is not so unwholesome as the air within a close room that has been often breathed and not changed.

Physicians have of late years happily discovered, after a contrary opinion had prevailed for ages, that fresh and cool air does good to persons suffering from Small-pox and other fevers. It is to be hoped that, in another century or two, we may all find that it is not bad even for people in health.

Appendix-- Ventilation.

It is not improbable, however, that the more rapid evaporation of moisture toward evening, may carry with it the volatile particles of corrupted animal and vegetable matter to an extent slightly in excess of that which occurs in the morning; but it is believed these would not equal the greater contamination from burning coals, and the usually greater stillness of the air, producing partial stagnation, so that the air would be a little nearer pure at night than in the day-time.

How unmistakably do all these investigations prove what we ought to have known and accepted without a moments hesitation, that the Creator, who made such vast and such minute provision for supplying every living creature with a constant and copious supply of fresh air, and made it so important for their existence that they cannot live a moment without it, has made the air at night just as pure and wholesome as in the day-time.

We can trace the scourge of foul air to our houses, and much of it to our bed-rooms. Never stop a fire-place in Winter nor Summer, where any living being stays night or day. If you are so fortunate as to have a fire-place in your room, paint it; when not in use adorn it with a bouquet of fresh flowers every morning, if you please, or do anything to make it attractive; but never close it.

If we breath one single breath, in the entire day, of impure air, it will weaken us, deduct from our capacity to attend to our daily duties, or shorten our lives, in exact mathematical proportion to the amount of impurity in that one single breath. Now we breathe about twenty times every minute, twelve hundred times every hour, twenty-eight thousand times every day; and nothing but absolute and perfectly pure air answers the exact requirements of perfect health. You can realize how difficult it is for one to mingle freely in the society of his fellow men, under existing circumstances, without being subjected to being poisoned by the foul air. I have no patent to present to you, which shall secure to you at all times perfectly pure air, without any further trouble on your part. There are no two constitutions precisely alike, any more than there are two human faces, or two hand-writings alike, and there are no two hours in our entire existence in which all the physical conditions

Appendix-Ventilation.

of our body are precisely the same. Therefore, you must feel fresh air is worth taking some trouble to obtain. You must then make it a study how to obtain it without chilling or overheating your body, in Winter and in Summer, at night and in the day-time; when you are lying down, and when you are sitting up; before eating and after eating; before exercising, while exercising and after exercising; when you are well, and when you are sick; when you are alone and when you are in the crowded cars, or in a crowded room; in wet weather and in dry; and for the ever-varying changes of the external atmosphere-all these conditions require separate and intelligent thought. Thus it appears that in all climates, and under all conditions of life, the purity of the atmosphere habitually respired, is essential to the maintenance of that power of resisting disease which even more than the ordinary state of health, is a measure of the real vigor of the system; for, owing to the extraordinary capability which the human body possesses of accommodating itself to circumstances, it not unfrequently happens that individuals continue for years to breathe a most unwholesome atmosphere without apparently suffering from it, and when they at last succumb to some epidemic disease, their death is attributed solely to the latter, the previous preparation of their bodies for the reception and development of the zymotic poison being altogether overlooked.

It is impossible, however, for one who carefully examines the evidence, to hesitate for a moment in the conclusion that the fatality of epidemics is almost invariably in precise proportion to the degree in which an impure atmosphere has been habitually respired, and that by due attention to the various means of promoting atmospheric purity, and especially efficient ventilation and sewerage, the rate of mortality may be enormously decreased, the amount and severity of sickness lowered in at least an equal proportion, and the fatality of epidemics almost completely annihilated. And it cannot be too strongly borne in mind, that the efficacy of such preventive measures has been most fully substantiated in regard to many of the very diseases in which the curative power