The pure open air is
certainly the most healthy fluid that man can breathe; and this is the
reason why a residence in the country has so benignant an effect upon the
human frame in general, when attended with all the comforts of refined
life. The air in cities is usually impregnated with particles of a more or
less deleterious nature; still this air is not so injurious as that of
crowded and heated rooms, where the breath of one human being is inhaled
as the vital atmosphere of another, with what effect it is easy to judge.
In the dwellings of the poor, where a family of ten or twelve persons
sometimes resides in a single room, whilst, perhaps, a small house
contains forty or fifty inmates, the windows are generally closed. Not a
breath of air is admitted except during the dog-days, and then the
external atmosphere is too stagnant and sultry to be of much use. All the
offices of the family, including their cookery, their meals, and their
repose, are carried on in this single room, the air of which, impregnated
with azote from the living occupants, and with fetor from the garments and
fragments of food, engenders those pestilential diseases which sometimes
break out with irresistible fury in some of the most densely populated
districts of the metropolis.
In the dwellings of the inferior tradesmen the same evil prevails. Though
the houses are not so thickly inhabited as those of the humbler class,
still there are sufficient numbers, added to the inveterate national
uncleanliness of body which we indicated in a preceding paper, render
these places of residence extremely insalubrious. A breath of air is
seldom admitted into the bed-rooms, in which there is always a close,
fetid smell. In the sitting-rooms the same evil is perceptible, and the
offensiveness of the smell, on entering them from the open air, is
oftentimes overpowering. In winter, a very small sitting-room, which
serves for a large family to sit and to take their meals in, is kept
hermetically closed, with a blazing fire in the grate. The room is soon
heated to excess, and its atmosphere, which has been breathed over and
over again, impregnated with carbon. A delicate girl, perhaps, leaves this
oven for a moment, and, without any gradation, plunges into a pure and
cold, or perhaps into a damp, cold atmosphere. What is the probable
consequence?—inflammatory action in the lungs, tuberculous deposit, and
death. And yet all this might have been avoided by ventilation.
The dwellings of the wealthier classes are not exempt from the same
visitations, arising from the same causes. Though there is a freer
circulation of air, and a more equal temperature in their vast apartments,
still in their parties and entertainments the want of ventilation is
severely felt. There seems to be a dread of admitting any external air
into a suite of rooms crowded with company; and when a sense of
suffocation actually forces some panting guest to open a window, an outcry
is raised as loud as if the baneful blast of the simoom, from the African
desert, were about to invade this sanctuary of British beauty and fashion.
No heed is taken of the consequences of breathing heated air; no account
is rendered of the death-chill likely to fall upon the young and lovely,
when from the impure they plunge into the pure atmospheric fluid; no
consequence is dreaded from the pale and haggard phantom that hovers over
each scene of festive enjoyment, and hurls its ice-bolt of destruction at
the fairest of our daughters: reckless do mothers expose these tender
budding flowers to the pestilential blast, until consumption has fixed its
deadly pangs upon the fair bosom of her who yesterday shone as the
brightest ornament of an admiring circle, and to-day sinks into a
premature grave.