Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper: Containing Five Hundred Receipes for Economical and Healthful Cooking; also, Many Directions for Securing Health and HappinessBeecher, Catharine Esther
General
Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper: Containing Five Hundred Receipes for Economical and Healthful Cooking; also, Many Directions for Securing Health and Happiness
Beecher, Catharine Esther
Cooking; Home economics
The most successful mode of ventilating a house is by creating a
current of warm air in a flue, into which an opening is made at both
the top and the bottom of a room, to carry off the impure air, while
a similar opening to admit outside air is made at the opposite side
of the room. This is the mode employed in chemical laboratories for
removing smells and injurious gases.
These statements give some idea of the evils to be remedied. But
the most difficult point is _how_ to secure the remedy; for often
the attempt to secure pure air by one class of persons brings
chills, colds, and disease on another class, from mere ignorance or
mismanagement.
To illustrate this, it must be borne in mind that those who live in
warm, close, and unventilated rooms are much more liable to take cold
from exposure to draughts and cold air than those of vigorous vitality
accustomed to breathe pure air.
Thus the strong and healthy husband, feeling the want of pure air in
the night, and knowing its importance, keeps windows open, and makes
such draughts that the wife, who lives all day in a close room and thus
is low in vitality, can not bear the change, has colds, and sometimes
perishes a victim to wrong modes of ventilation.
So, even in health-establishments, the patients will pass most of their
days and nights in badly-ventilated rooms. But at times the physician,
or some earnest patient, insists on a mode of ventilation that brings
more evil than good to the delicate inmates.
The grand art of ventilating houses is by some method that will empty
rooms of the vitiated air and bring in a supply of pure air _by small
and imperceptible currents_.
But this important duty of a Christian woman is one that demands
more science, care, and attention than almost any other; and yet, to
prepare her for this duty has never been any part of female education.
Young women are taught to draw mathematical diagrams and to solve
astronomical problems; but few, if any, of them are taught to solve the
problem of a house constructed to secure pure and moist air by day and
night for all its inmates by safe methods.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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