Lectures on Ventilation: Being a Course Delivered in the Franklin Institute of PhiladelphiaLeeds, Lewis W.
Science
Lectures on Ventilation: Being a Course Delivered in the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia
Leeds, Lewis W.
Ventilation
Now, having learned the necessity for pure, fresh air, and studied the
general laws governing its circulation, let us apply these principles to
every-day life. To every-_day_ life? I should say every-_hour_ life--nay,
every _moment_ of our lives; for twenty times every minute of our entire
life, from the cradle to the grave, do we breathe what ought to be pure
air. Is it always pure?
If we breathe one single breath, in the entire day, of _impure_ air, it
will weaken us, deduct from our capacity to attend to our daily duties,
and shorten our lives, in exact mathematical proportion to the amount of
impurity in that one single breath. Now, we breathe 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.
Well, you may ask, at first thought, if fresh air is such a panacea for
all evils, and there is such an abundance of it out of doors, why not
breathe it, and always enjoy perfect health?
Think one moment. I eat my breakfast in the morning, generally refreshed
by a night of good sound sleep, (for I sleep with my windows open.)
Immediately after breakfast, I enter the cars to come to the city. What
a smell comes from the car as the door is opened! and unless I wish
to incur the displeasure, or provoke the indignation, of almost every
passenger, by opening a window, I am obliged to sit in that foul,
offensive atmosphere, and breathe the poisonous exhalations from my
own lungs, and that from dozens of others, some of them, it may be,
badly diseased, (most persons' lungs _are diseased_ in this country,
from breathing foul air, and many other diseases besides consumption
are produced thereby.)
Thus, in one half hour, I have inhaled six hundred times of this foul
and poisonous air, and the blood has carried it to every portion of my
body, so that my entire system is completely saturated, poisoned, yes,
thoroughly poisoned by it, from the crown of my head to the soles of
my feet.
And thus is the day commenced. Your blood is thoroughly poisoned before
your breakfast is digested; for your breakfast will no more digest
without pure air than the coal in your stove will burn without it. You
are subjected to headache, dyspepsia, and a half dozen other aches and
pains, and are tired out long before night. And thus you are killed long
before you would die if you breathed pure air only.
And am I relieved from the difficulty when I arrive in the city?
Start to-morrow morning at the Delaware River, on Arch or Walnut
Streets, or any other street, and go to the Schuylkill. Inquire of every
individual, in office, store, dwelling or factory, if he knows whether
he had pure air to breathe all day, or whether he can tell you, with
any degree of accuracy, how pure the air was in the room he occupied
for any hour of that day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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