The only thing we dread in these camps is the imported "cold." Dr.
Lawrence Flick was the first to show us the way in this respect as in
several others. He put up a big sign at the entrance of White Haven
Sanatorium, "No persons suffering from colds allowed to enter," and
traced the only epidemic of colds in the sanatorium to the visit of a
butcher with the grip. I put up a similar sign at the gate of my Oregon
camp, and never had a patient catch cold from tenting out in the snow
and "Oregon mists" until the small son of the cook came back from the
village school, shivering and sneezing, when seven of the thirteen
patients "caught it" within a week.
What will cure a consumptive will surely not kill a healthy man. I am
delighted to say that it shows signs of becoming a fad now, and sleeping
porches are being put on houses all over the country. No house in
California is considered complete without them. The ideal bedroom is a
small dressing-room, opening on a wide screened porch, or balcony, with
a door wide enough to allow the bed to be rolled inside during storms or
in severest weather.
Sleep on a porch, or in a room with windows on two sides wide open, and
the average living-room or office begins to feel stuffy and "smothery"
at once. Apply the same treatment here. Learn to sit in a gentle draft,
and you'll avoid two-thirds of your colds and three-fourths of your
headaches. It may be necessary in winter to warm the draft, but don't
let any patent method of ventilation delude you into keeping your
windows shut any hour of the day or night.
On the other hand, don't fall into the widespread delusion that because
air is cold it is necessarily pure. Some of the vilest air imaginable is
that shut up in those sepulchres known as "best bedrooms," which chill
your very marrow. The rheumatism or snuffles you get from sleeping
between their icy sheets comes from the crop of bacilli which has lurked
there since they were last aired. The "no heat in a bedroom" dogma is
little better than superstition, born of those fecund parents which mate
so often, stinginess and puritanism. Practically, the room which will
_never_ have a window opened in it in winter is the one without any
heat.
Similarly, the air in an underheated church, hall, or theatre is almost
sure to be foul. The janitor will keep every opening closed in order to
get the temperature up. Some churches are never once decently ventilated
from December to May. The same old air, with an ever richer crop of
germs, is reheated and served up again every Sunday. The "odor of
sanctity" is the residue of the breaths and perspiration of successive
generations. Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but it is sometimes
an astonishingly long step behind it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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