The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 68, June, 1863: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
Science
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 68, June, 1863: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
"Wholesome air is equally essential with wholesome food; hence it is
that crowding individuals together in close, ill-ventilated apartments,
as is often the case in boarding-schools, manufactories, and
work-houses, is extremely prejudicial, both as a predisposing and
exciting cause of tubercular disease."
The great Baudeloque considers impure air the only real cause of
scrofula, other causes assisting. He thinks that no scrofula could be
developed without this cause, whatever others might be in operation.
An English writer who was physician to the Princess Victoria
says,--"There can be no doubt that the confined air of gloomy alleys,
manufactories, work-houses, and schools, and of our nurseries and very
sitting-rooms, is a powerful means of augmenting the hereditary
predisposition to scrofula, and of inducing such a disposition _de
novo_."
To drink from the same tumbler, to eat from the same plate, to wear the
same under-clothes, to wash in the same water, even with the cleanest of
friends, would offend most people. But these are as alabaster whiteness
and absolute purity, compared with the common practice of crowding into
unventilated rooms, and thus sucking into the innermost parts of our
vital organs the foulest secretions from each other's skins and lungs. I
wish it were possible for these vile exhalations to be imbued with some
dark color, if but temporarily. Then decency would join with reason in
demanding a pure atmosphere.
NIGHT AIR.
Consumptives, and all invalids, and indeed persons in health, are
cautioned to avoid the night air. Do those who offer this advice forget
that there is no other air at night but "night air"? Certainly we cannot
breathe day air during the night. Do they mean that we should shut
ourselves up in air-tight rooms, and breathe over and over again,
through half the twenty-four hours, the atmosphere we have already
poisoned? We have only the choice between night air pure and night air
poisoned with the exhalations from our skins and lungs, perhaps from
lungs already diseased. A writer pertinently speaks on this point after
the following fashion:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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