Worth of Fresh Air.
Among the sanitary enactments of the last few years is the Local Government Act, for the better enforcement of appliances for Public Health. An Office has been established specially for the business of this Act, with a well-paid Secretary and Medical Inspector: it arose upon the cessation of the labours of the Board of Health; and the gain by the change may be estimated by the following Hints from an engineering Sanitary Inspector of the Local Government Office:
Sanitary work is not necessarily doing some great thing, but consists more in prompt and efficient attention to small matters. Fresh air is the best disinfectant, but most people, even in England, treat fresh air as if it were an evil. We shut it out of our houses by day, and confine foul air in our rooms by night, especially during the time we use them for sleep.
An invalid takes a carriage airing with closed windows; such a ride is, however, in truth, a carriage poisoning. If an open carriage cannot be used on any day in the year with safety, the individual had better not use a carriage; and no room should be occupied which has not an unceasing flow of fresh air through it—not necessarily a draught, but motion. Open flues, open doors, or open windows admit of change of air; not, however, always with comfort to the inmates. But as a room cannot be hermetically sealed up, provision ought to be made for an admission of fresh air, rather than for the stealing in of sewer, drain, cesspool, or sink gases. List up doors, carpet floors, paper window-joints, and block up fireplaces, if contagious diseases are to have their most malignant effects; ventilate houses, by open windows on staircases or in corridors if possible, but by all means ventilate. Cold does not kill so many as foul air, although a low temperature generally increases the weekly bills of mortality. But it is the very poor who suffer most. The Chinese say, “Fools and beggars only suffer from cold; the one have not wit to clothe properly, the others are too poor to clothe sufficiently.” Clothing ought to be the protection against cold, not warm and foul air. In every house in which typhus fever or small-pox prevails it will be safer for the inhabitants of such houses to remove the windows rather than to keep them closed. An open shed in a field with warm clothing will be better than a closed room in a town. I have seen fever patients and small-pox patients treated beneath open sheds in the country safely, and I have heard experienced surgeons remark that fresh air and diet were of more avail than medicine. I have seen a British army in hospital and in the field surrounded by foul air, wasting away by fever. I have seen that army restored to health by cleanliness and an admission of fresh air. The air was not cooked nor manipulated by any patented apparatus, but was admitted direct from the vast ocean of fresh air about and above, by slits in the ridge of huts in the Crimea, by the removal of top squares from fixed windows at the great hospitals on the Bosphorus, and by the opening up of flues wherever these could with advantage be formed in those hospitals. The ordinary atmosphere of any country freely admitted and unceasingly changed is the only safe medium in which to breathe. In all countries and under all climates excessive disease to man comes from foul air generated within his dwelling rather than from any external influences. The remedy against disease is, therefore, fresh air. Infection is scarcely possible amid abundance of fresh air. Soap and water can kill contagion if used in time.
The intercepting main sewers of the metropolis, if brought into use, will actually add to existing evils rather than remove them, if these sewers only pass away large volumes of surplus water which now dilute the deposit in many scores of miles of secondary and branch sewers and drains. There are hundreds of open sewer ventilators within the metropolis sending out unceasingly thousands of cubic feet of sewage gases to the streets above. All this vast volume of gas might be cheaply disinfected by being made to pass slowly through charcoal, and all foul sewers may either be cleansed or be disinfected in time.
Town and Country.
Sir E. B. Lytton, in Blackwood’s Magazine, observes: We who are lovers of the country are not unnaturally disposed to consider that our preference argues some finer poetry of sentiment—some steadier devotion to those ennobling studies which sages commend as the fitting occupations of retirement. But the facts do not justify that self-conceit upon our part. It was said by a philosopher who was charged with all the cares of a world’s empire, that “there is no such great matter in retirement. A man may be wise and sedate in a crowd as well as in a desert, and keep the noise of the world from getting within him. In this case, as Plato observes, the walls of a town and the enclosure of a sheep-fold may be made the same thing.” Certainly, poets, and true poets, have lived by choice in the dingy streets of great towns. Men of science, engaged in reasonings the most abstruse, on subjects the most elevating, have usually fixed their dwelling-place in bustling capitals, as if the din of the streets without deepened, by the force of a contrast, the quiet of those solitary closets wherein they sat analysing the secret heart of that nature whose every-day outward charms they abandoned to commonplace adorers. On the other hand, men perforce engaged in urban occupations, neither bards nor sages but City clerks and traders, feel a yearning of the heart towards a home in the country; loving rural nature with so pure a fervour that, if closer intercourse is forbidden, they are contented to go miles every evening to kiss the skirt of her robe. Their first object is to live out of London, if but in a suburb; to refresh their eyes with the green of a field; to greet the first harbinger of spring in the primrose venturing forth in their own tiny realm of garden. It is for them, as a class, that cities extend beyond their ancient bounds; while our nobles yet clung to their gloomy halls in the Fleet, traders sought homesteads remote from their stalls and wares in the pleasing village of Charing.
Recreations of the People.
The preservation of open places for the recreation of the people is watched with much jealousy by those who take an interest in the assertion of popular rights. Mr. J. S. Mill, the historian, has put in this eloquent plea for their maintenance: