VENTILATION OF PUBLIC BUILDINGS AND DWELLING

HOUSES.

Great plagues and epidemics have ceased to ravage civilized communities, as was their wont, and the mean duration of life is steadily increasing. At Geneva, in the sixteenth century, the mean probability of life was under nine years; by slow steps, progress was made to fourteen years, in the seventeenth; thirty years in the eighteenth; and in this century, the limit is rapidly approaching forty-five years. The improvement indicated within three centuries, has resulted from advancing knowledge and more enlightened practices for the maintenance of life in health. This country has not kept pace with the better ratio observed in Geneva, mainly because there has been a lack of attention to the grand principles and essential details of sanitary reform. Dr. Rush was cur only author discoursing on this pregnant subject prior to the year 1863, and it was not until six years later, that a State Board of Health was organized in Massachusetts, that being the first established in this country. Circumstances controlled the popular mind in other directions, while Europe was multiplying such institutions; and in consequence the vital statistics of that State compare unfavorably with the average of trans-Atlantic communities similarly enlightened. In estimating the value of life, it is important to ascertain how many days of sickness are included in the sum total of existence. In Europe the average duration of sickness for each individual, is a fraction less than 20 days per year. Massachusetts is divided into six geographical sections for the compilation of returns, supplying information similar to that collected by European boards of health; and from those figures we learn that the highest rate of incapacitation through ill-health, obtains in the Boston division, where the average is 24 days per year, or one-fifth more than the percentage exhibited in Europe. This does not result from any cardinal defect in the climate, as the Berkshire Hills division shows a total of only 14 days; or less than two-thirds of the European average. The whole State presents a total more favorable to health than the Boston division, the rate being 17 days to the year; but in that respect a marked decline is observable, the average for eight years, ending with 1872, having been only 14 days, or three days less per capita than the ratio obtained in the year last nanied. În this State we possess no statistics which will enable us to compare the individual results of incapacitation by sickness with the Massachusetts tables; but we may be sure that our loss approximates thereto. The money value of the labor lost in Massachusetts by sickness alone, has been estimated for one year, at $39,146,980. The reader will draw his own conclusions as to the figures which may represent our losses on that score.

Every man must die; but a large proportion of the sickness commonly endured is known to be preventable. so much so, that it is assumed that the death rate, which exceeds 21 per thousand per annum in Milwaukee, and 30 per thousand in Boston, could be reduced, with proper care, to 11 per thousand. Sanitary science offers means for the perfection of human government toward the point indicated; but we are slowly reaping its advantages. Ventilation is but one of many subjects which should command universal attention. Upon the realization of efficient ventilation depends life, health and happiness for untold millions who shall inherit this fertile land; hence it is impossible to overrate its importance. Two-thirds of all the funds now being expended in the maintenance of benevolent institutions, might with advantage be devoted to the procurement of better hygienic conditions for the classes from which our State institutions are filled with chronic misery, allied to physical and moral decrepitude. Prevention is barely possible with the means at our disposal; but once the operating causes have eventuated in disease, insanity and crime, no human instrumentality can effect a cure. A sound mind can sel

dom be discovered unless associated with a healthy body.

The major portion of the work to be accomplished must be devolved upon individuals. Culture, which means more than collegiate training, and does not necessarily include erudition, should produce perfect humanity; well developed in mind, body and estate, capable of perpetuating the best qualities of the race; and, therefore, able to appreciate all the circumstances that favor its highest development. Governments can only assist what the individual may directly accomplish. Associations, however wisely directed, must depend for their ultimate success upon the intelligence of the mass to which their representations must be addressed; and for the amelioration of which their organizations are intended. The hope of society rests on the growth of personal enlightenment.

EARLIER TRACES OF VENTILATION.

Five thousand year ago, when the plans for the pyramid of Cheops may have been in preparation, there was, more knowledge among the learned, as to ventilation, than we find to have been in existence among Anglo-Saxons a century since. The great pyramid had an arrangement for the ventilation of its interior chambers. The information implied by that provision, contrasts with singular force, when we consider that one hundred years ago in Plymouth Sound, within sight of two marvels of engineering work, the breakwater and Eddystone Light House, a man was permitted to sink himself in a strong box, in fulfilment of foolish wagers, because the scientific men of the time and the governing classes were alike ignorant as to the necessity for fresh air to maintain life. The death of that man remained an unsolved problem for many years. Egypt had no darkness to parallel such ignorance. Little more than a century earlier, the president of the college of physicians, in London, in an inaugural address, informed

his fellow physicians, that no one knew, nor ever could know, what purpose was served by the phenomena of breathing. Samuel Pepys records the fact, in his visit to Gresham College, in these words: "What among other fine discourse pleased me most, was Sir George Ent about respiration; that it is not to this day known, or concluded on among physicians, nor to be done either, how the action is managed by nature or for what use it is." Sir George Ent was a University graduate, a Fellow of the Royal Society and a leader among the scientists of his day. The question of ventil ation was thus authoritatively placed beyond the realm of investigation.

The knowledge which the Egyptians possessed had probably come to them from a much earlier time, by intercourse with the highly civilized Ethiopian nation, inhabiting Arabia, Felix and the coast. The Greeks and Romans certainly possessed such information, seeing that the early temples of Esculapias were Sanitaria rather than medical schools, and that Hippocrates wrote the earliest hygienic treatise now extant treating of "Airs, Waters and Places." Means of disinfection were used at Athens during a piague; the agency of fire, which is only now beginning to be again recognized having been used by Acron of Crotona, with great advantage to the city.

Ancient Rome appreciated sanitary art and appointed officers to superintend the construction and management of buildings, public and private, to secure salubrity and safety. The Mosaic ceremonial laws, which had their origin in the enlightenment of the court and priesthood of Egypt, were founded upon correct information as to human requirements; and Moses regulated the food, purifications, ablutions and other necessary details tending towards the maintenance of the health of the Jews, who are at this time the most healthful and best preserved of all the races on earth. The Greeks cared as much for the physical as for the intellectual supremacy of the people; and in their cities, public baths were provided for the poor as well as the rich. The Romans imitated this feature of Greek civilization, and, also, following the example of that nation, Antoninus Pins initiated the appointment of medical officers, in Roman towns and cities, to preserve the general health. Health institutions now existent in Germany and Italy find their origin in the days of Antoninus. The buildings constructed for public baths contain provision for ventilation as well as for heating, which soon after the influx of barbarism fell entirely into disuse. How completely the scientific acquirements of the ancient world had been lost, can be seen dimly in the records of the dark ages, which may be said to have covered the whole earth, seeing that India, once a focus of enlightenment, witnessed the wholesale slaughter of prisoners in the Black Hole at Calcutta, by foul air, in 1756, because the authorities were ignorant of the laws governing ventilation. Among the common people there came to be a stupid horror of fresh air and the professional classes were too besotted by prejudice to lift their patients out of the mire.

NECESSITY FOR VENTILATION.

Human life demands fresh air, which must be in some degree pure. Eight parts of carbonic acid, to ten thousand parts of atmosphere, has been named as the maximum of impurity that can be endured without injurious consequences supervening. Unfortunately in most of our public buildings, schools among the rest, the proportion commonly obtained is five times as great as that indicated by science as the ultimatum. The body has a wonderful capacity to adapt itself to surrounding circumstances. When the lungs fail to purify the blood, the liver comes to the rescue and is proportionally over-worked. The fœtus supported directly from the circulating system of its mother and having no action of the lungs to cleanse the vital current, developes a corresponding proportion of the other organ, which, at the time of birth, is always largely in excess of the post-natal requirements of the system. With food of another class less prepared to sustain life, the breathing apparatus comes into operation, and the liver generally decreases in relative size, In later life the two systems of purification supplement each other. on the same principle, hence minor impurities can be endured without immediately poisonous results. Childred fall sick in over-crowded school-rooms and nausea relieves the stomach from food which the want of sufficient oxygen and the presence of animal impurities in the air, combined with carbonic acid has rendered noxious to life. Such incidents are too common to procure from the average observer such attention as they deserve.

It is not too strong an expression when we assert that millions of human lives have been, and are being, sacrificed for want of care as to this primal necessity of our being, ventilation.

The president of our State Medical Association, Dr. J. B. Whiting, in the last annual address to that society says, with much force: Our children are crowded into school rooms that have little or no ventilation except as the heat of summer admits of opening doors and windows. From fifty to seventy children are often kept in a school room by the hour when the supply of fresh air is not sufficient for one fourth that number. If any one doubts this, let him visit the primary departments of the schools in this state at a season of the year when artificial heat is required, when doors and windows are closed, and he will find the atmosphere of the room not simply impure and oppressive but offensive and disgusting to the sense, and his first impulse will be to escape. If he remains, the offended sense soon ceases to protest and the visitor breaths the contaminated air with seeming impunity. But the little ones, who are compelled to live in such an atmosphere day after day and month after month do not thus escape. The more robust live through it; but the delicate ones succumb to the poison and fall out of the ranks."

Happily this subject is now commanding attention in every part of the Union. Men remember the quaint saying that,

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ers who lived in houses of reeds, had constitutions of oaks; but we, who live in houses of oak, have constitutions of reed." The

sentence serves to arrest the thoughtless to a grave subject, although it is untrue in its essence. The men who in hyperborean regions would attempt to discharge the functions of life in houses of reeds, would not transmit it to their offspring constitutions of oak. The house must be well constructed for shelter from the elements, as well as for ventilation, if the highest purposes of life are to be aided by urban existence. The latest results in vital phenomena sustain the story of the ages that, with every century of civilization there is a large appreciation of individual endurance; a fact that directly contradicts the existence to which we have referred. The house of reeds was, in many respects, as ill ventilated as the most compact dwelling house of to-day; and where the largest fires were maintained it was barely possible for the resident, perpetually revolving before its blaze like a spitted turkey, to thaw one side of his refrigerated body before the other had become frozen. Between the two styles of dwelling there is merely a choice of evils; but with the houses of to-day, ready to our hands, systems of ventilation may be devised which will cheaply and greatly enhance the comfort and duration of life.

A human being requires, at the very lowest estimate, 350 cubic feet of air for every twenty-four hours; and the authorities assert that 360 cubic inches per minute is the quantity demanded for the respirating process by every healthy adult.

The requirements of children are but little less. Air that has been breathed is rendered unfit for further use, temporarily, because it has lost a portion of its free oxygen; has become charged with carbonic acid to one hundred times the former volume of that ingredient, and has become impregnated with an animal vapor such as offends the nostrils in every crowded room. The presence of carbonic acid is made the test of impurity, but animal effluvia constitutes a terrible factor of sickness. Could some process be devised to separate the vile components from the better air, as we winnow the chaff from grain, without exposing children and adults to the breezy process used as an illustration, that would be the sum of excellence in ventilation; but no such scheme has yet been put into practical form.

air confined in an from the outer atneeded for breathEvidence has been evil consequences.

The best devise only aims at diluting the foul occupied room, by the introduction of currents mosphere; hence, a much larger supply than is ing is necessary for the preservation of health. accumulated from many States illustrating the of breathing impure air. One authority says, after twenty years study of the subject, "many cases of consumption, heart disease, and kindred evils, originate in the foul air of school-rooms and other crowded places. Dr. McCormac contends that consumption and all tubercular diseases result from breathing air already vitiated by respiration. Life cannot be enjoyed nor realized in its highest excellency, unless a sufficiency of pure air is supplied at all hours, sleeping and waking, and the scholar or literary man, whose sedentarv occupation and brain labor makes special demands upon the vital power, should be in an exceptional degree cared for by a supply of oxygenated air.