Under such conditions the state of health of both theater goers and performers is bound to suffer. Many persons can testify from personal experience to the ill effects incurred by spending a few hours in a crowded and unventilated theater; yet the very fact that the stay in such buildings is a brief one seems to render most people indifferent, and complaints are seldom uttered. It really rests with the theater-going public to enforce the much-needed improvements. As long as they will flock to a theater on account of some attractive play or "star actor," disregarding entirely the unsanitary condition of the building, so long will the present notoriously bad conditions remain. When the public does not call for reforms, theater managers and owners of playhouses will not, as a rule, trouble themselves about the matter. We have a right to demand theater buildings with less outward and inside gorgeousness, but in which the paramount subjects of comfort, safety, and health are diligently studied and generously provided for. Let the general public but once show a determined preference for sanitary conditions and surroundings in theaters and abandon visits to ill-kept theaters, and I venture to predict that the necessary reforms in sanitation will soon be introduced, at least in the better class of playhouses. In the cheaper theaters, concert and amusement halls, houses with "continuous" shows, variety theaters, etc., sanitation is even more urgently required, and may be readily enforced by a few visits and peremptory orders from the Health Board. When, a year ago, the writer, in a paper on Theater Sanitation presented at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association, stated that "chemical analyses show the air in the dress circle and gallery of many a theater to be in the evening more foul than the air of street sewers," the statement was received by some of his critics with incredulity. Yet the fact is true of many theaters. Taking the amount of carbonic acid in the air as an indication of its contamination, and assuming that the organic vapors are in proportion to the amount of carbonic acid (not including the CO_{2} due to the products of illumination), we know that normal outdoor air contains from 0.03 to 0.04 parts of CO_{2} per 100 parts of air, while a few chemical analyses of the air in English theaters, quoted below, suffice to prove how large the contamination sometimes is: