One hundred years ago the English were allowed by the Great Mogul or Emperor of India, to build warehouses and dwellings in certain parts of his Empire. One of these mercantile settlements or factories, as they were called, was planted on the bank of a large river just where Calcutta, the capital city of Bengal, now stands.
In the year 1756, the nabob, or tributary king of the province of Bengal died, and was succeeded by a very young man, who bore the outlandish looking title of Surajah Dowlah. This young barbarian cast a covetous eye on the neighboring British factory, and one summer day attacked the place suddenly with a large army. The small party of English who were in the factory, despairing of their ability to effect any successful defense, tried to make their escape to some ships which were lying in the river.
Several of the fugitives reached the vessels in safety. But in the confusion of the flight, one hundred and forty-six individuals fell into the hands of the victorious nabob. These, his officers thrust for the night into a small cell, which was used as the prison of the fortress, and was known under the dismal name of the Black Hole of Calcutta. This cell had but two small square holes for windows, and was only eighteen feet long and fourteen feet wide, so that the last person of the one hundred and forty-six had to be crushed in upon the rest with violence, as the door was closed and locked. The anguish of the crowded captives soon became so great, in this vile hole, that the neighborhood resounded with the noise of their struggles and cries. As the night wore on, these sounds, however, gradually sunk into silence. When the morning came, and the door of the prison was opened, the reason of this silence became sadly apparent. In the place of the one hundred and forty-six prisoners who were shut up on the previous day, they took out one hundred and twenty-three corpses, and, twenty-three miserable beings, who looked more like ghastly spectres than men, and who could hardly be said to be alive. This occurrence furnished one remarkable instance of the deadly power of the poison vapors which are poured out from the inside of living beings. Now I will tell you about another case of a similar kind.
A few years ago, a vessel started from Cork in Ireland, to take a large number of emigrants to a ship just about to sail from Liverpool. A violent storm sprung up in the night, as the vessel was crossing the Irish Channel, and the captain, fearing that the alarmed passengers would interfere with the sailors, and render it difficult to work the ship, sent them all below into the hold, and covered them closely down with the hatches. The imprisoned passengers soon found that they were suffocating, and called and knocked loudly for help, but their cries either were unheard or disregarded. In the morning the hatches were removed, and to the horror of the captain and his crew, the hold was found half full of dead bodies and dying people, instead of containing living men and women. Such are the fearful consequences which follow, when human beings are forced to breathe the same air over and over again.
You are very much shocked, both at the savage cruelty of the Indian tyrant, and at the carelessness and ignorance of the Irish captain. But what will you think of yourself if I now show that you do, in a small degree, every night, what they did on so large a scale? What was it that caused the closeness of this room before we opened the window? It was the presence of precisely the same kind of poison, as that which killed the prisoners at Calcutta, and the passengers in the hold of the ship. That poison did not destroy you in a single night, only because it had not gathered in sufficient strength to do so. Your room was not more than half as large as the Black Hole of Calcutta, but there were only two of you shut up in it instead of one hundred and forty-six. The air of your room was merely hurtful instead of being deadly. But the fact still remains. When you rose in the morning, that air was not fit for a human creature to breathe.
When you rise to-morrow morning, just go out of doors for five minutes, and observe carefully the freshness of the air. That air is in the state in which God keeps it for breathing. Then come back suddenly into your close room, and your own senses will at once make you feel how very far the air of your chamber is from being in the same wholesome and serviceable condition.
This is one way, then, in which people produce derangement in their bodies, and cause their works, or organs, to get choked up and clogged. They are not careful always to keep fresh air immediately around them. They suffocate themselves slowly; taking, perhaps, a long time to complete their task, but, nevertheless, accomplishing it none the less surely. Individuals who dwell in crowded towns, and, therefore, have to live by day as well as by night in close, impure apartments, go down to their graves, even before they have reached their prime; and their thin pale faces, dull sunk eyes, and languid movements, tell they are doing so, with painful clearness. It is well known that people who dwell in towns and work in close rooms, as a rule, die seventeen years earlier than men who dwell in the country, and work in the fields by day.
Country folks escape this severe penalty, because even when they half smother themselves by night, the thoroughly fresh air in which they spend the day goes a great way toward the removal of the mischief. Still they are by no means free from all penalty. You yourself have suffered from breathing bad air. Do you remember last autumn, when I came to see you sick in bed with the fever? Do you recollect how your limbs ached, and your skin burned then, and how you tossed restlessly from side to side, without being able to sleep, your mouth and tongue being brown and parched with dryness which water could not moisten? You could not raise your head from the pillow; and once when I asked you how you felt, you answered me by telling me something about the corn stacks and the last harvest, being quite unconscious of what you were saying. What do you think was the matter with you then? Your body and blood were full of poisonous vapor. And what do you think had made them so? Why, fresh air had not done its work of purification as it ought. You had been breathing a great deal of impure air, and were paying the penalty for having done so. If you had seen the prisoners in the Black Hole of Calcutta an hour or two before they died, you would have found them exactly in the same state.
The term “fever” is taken from a Latin word which signifies “to burn.” The skin and the body feel burning hot in fever, because impure poisonous blood is flowing everywhere through their vessels, in the place of pure blood, and the blood is poisonous because it has not been freed from its poison-vapors as fast as they have been bred in, or thrown into its streams. In the worst forms of fever the blood gets so impure that it steams out, through the breath, vapors which are able to produce the same kind of disease in other people, and which are, under these circumstances, termed infection. The infectious poison-vapors of fever get so strong when they are received into close rooms, and are not allowed to be blown away, that they often kill persons who breathe them in that state, very quickly.
But you want me to explain how all the mischief, which results from breathing foul air, may be prevented. Come down with me into the garden, and creatures that you believe to be of far inferior powers to yourself, shall give you a lesson.