THE EVIL EFFECT OF REBREATHING the air can not be overestimated. We take back into our bodies that which has just been rejected. The blood thereupon leaves the lungs, bearing, not the invigorating oxygen, but refuse matter to obstruct the whole system. We soon feel the effect. The muscles become inactive. The blood stagnates. The heart acts slowly. The food is undigested. The brain is clogged. The head aches. Instances of fatal results are only too frequent. [Footnote: During the English war in India, in the eighteenth century, one hundred and forty-six prisoners were shut up in a room scarcely large enough to hold them. The air could enter only by two narrow windows. At the end of eight hours, but twenty-three persons remained alive, and these were in a most deplorable condition. This prison is well called "The Black Hole of Calcutta."—Percy relates that after the battle of Austerlitz, three hundred Russian prisoners were confined in a cavern, where two hundred and sixty of them perished in a few hours.—The stupid captain of the ship Londonderry, during a storm at sea, shut the hatches. There were only seven cubic feet of space left for each person, and in six hours ninety of the passengers were dead.] The constant breathing of even the slightly impure air of our houses can not but tend to undermine the health. The blood is not purified, and is thus in a condition to receive the seeds of disease at any time. The system uninspired by the energizing oxygen is sensitive to cold. The pale cheek, the lusterless eye, the languid step, speak but too plainly of oxygen starvation. In such a soil, catarrh, scrofula, and kindred diseases run riot. [Footnote: One not very strong, or unable powerfully to resist conditions unfavorable to health, and with a predisposition to lung disease, will be sure, sooner or later, by partial lung starvation and blood poisoning, to develop pulmonary consumption. The lack of what is so abundant and so cheap—good, pure air—is unquestionably the one great cause of this terrible disease.—BLACK'S Ten Laws of Health.]
CONCERNING THE NEED FOR VENTILATION.—The foul air which passes off from the lungs and through the pores of the skin does not fall to the floor, but diffuses itself through the surrounding atmosphere. A single breath will to a trifling but certain extent taint the air of a whole room. [Footnote: This grows out of a well-known philosophical principle called the Diffusion of Gases, whereby two gases tend to mix in exact proportions, no matter what may be the quantity of each.—STEELE'S Popular Chemistry, p. 86, and Popular Physics, p. 52.] A light will vitiate as much air as a dozen persons. Many breaths and lights therefore rapidly unfit the air for our use.
The perfection of ventilation is reached when the air of a room is as pure as that out of doors. To accomplish this result, it is necessary to allow for each person six hundred cubic feet of space, while ventilation is still going on in the best manner known.
In spite of these well-known facts, scarcely any pains are taken to supply fresh air, while the doors and windows where the life-giving oxygen might creep in are hermetically stopped.
How often is this true of the sick room. Yet here the danger of bad air is intensified. The expired breath of the patient is peculiarly threatening to himself as well as to others. Nature is seeking to throw off the poison of the disease. The scavengers of the body are all at work. The breath and the insensible perspiration are loaded with impurities. [Footnote: The floating dust in the air, revealed to us by the sunbeam shining through a crack in the blinds, shows the abundance of these impurities, and also the presence of germs which, lodging in the lungs, may implant disease, unless thrown off by a vigorous constitution. "On uncovering a scarlet fever patient, a cloud of fine dust is seen to rise from the body—contagious dust, that for days will retain its poisonous properties."—YOUMANS. (See p. 300.)] The odor is oftentimes exceedingly offensive. Sick and well alike need an abundance of fresh air. But, too often, it is the only want not supplied.
Our sitting rooms, heated by furnaces or red-hot stoves, generally have no means of ventilation, or, if provided, they are seldom used. A window is occasionally dropped to give a little relief, as if pure air were a rarity, and must be doled out to the suffering lungs in morsels, instead of full and constant draughts. The inmates are starved by scanty lung food, and stupefied by foul air. The process goes on year by year. The weakened and poisoned body at last succumbs to disease, while we, in our blindness and ignorance, talk of the mysterious Providence which thus untimely cuts down the brightest intellects. The truth is, death is often simply the penalty for violating nature's laws. Bad air begets disease; disease begets death.
In our churches, the foul air left by the congregation on Sunday is shut up during the week, and heated for the next Lord's day, when the people assemble to rebreathe the polluted atmosphere. They are thus forced, with every breath they take, to violate the physical laws of Him whom they meet to worship,—laws written not three thousand years ago upon Mount Sinai on tables of stone, but to-day engraved in the constitution of their own living, breathing bodies. On brains benumbed and starving for oxygen, the purest truth and the highest eloquence fall with little force.
We sleep in a small bedroom from which every breath of fresh air is excluded, because we believe night air to be unhealthy, [Footnote: There is a singular prejudice against the night air. Yet, as Florence Nightingale aptly says, what other air can we breathe at night? We then have the choice between foul air within and pure air without. For, in large cities especially, the night air is far more wholesome than that of the daytime. To secure fresh air at night, we must open the windows of our bedroom.] and so we breathe its dozen hogsheads of air over and over again, and then wonder why we awaken in the morning so dull and unrefreshed! Return to our room after inhaling the fresh, morning air, and the fetid odor we meet on opening the door, is convincing proof how we have poisoned our lungs during the night.
Each room should be supplied with two thousand feet of fresh air per hour for every person it contains. Our ingenuity ought to find some way of doing this advantageously and pleasantly. A moiety of the care we devote to delicate articles of food, drink, and dress would abundantly meet this prime necessity of our bodies.
Open the windows a little at the top and the bottom. Put on plenty of clothing to keep warm by day and by night, and then let the inspiring oxygen come in as freely as God has given it. Pure air is the cheapest necessity and luxury of life. Let it not be the rarest!