Lectures on Ventilation / Being a Course Delivered in the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia

by Lewis W. Leeds

I consider them very conducive to health in a living-room, morally and physically.

But this want of carbonic acid does not last long.

The next is M. Dumas' lecture-room. At commencement of lecture 42·5, and at close of lecture 67 parts in ten thousand.

Now, I think we are on the right track for discovering that mysterious poison that has carried so many of our friends to their graves, even in the very prime of life.

Here we have dormitories, 52; do., 37; asylum, 17; school-room, 30; do., 56; Chamber of Deputies, 16; Opera Comique, parterre, 15; do., ceiling, 28; stable, 7; do., 14; hospital, Madrid, 30; do., do., 43; air of bed-room on rising in the morning, 48; the same after being ventilated two hours, 16; railroad car, 34; workshop, Munich, 19; full room, do., 22; lecture-room, 32; beer-saloon, 49; and worst of all is a well-filled school-room, 72 parts of carbonic acid in 10,000.

That, I think, is enough. Here we have the solution of the whole mystery.

It is not in the external atmosphere that we must look for the greatest impurities, but it is in our own houses that the blighting, withering curse of foul air is to be found. We are thus led to the conclusion that our own breath is our greatest enemy.

The "Health of Towns Commission," in their investigations, after examining various trades, where the employees were confined mostly in houses, and having left the scavengers to the last, expecting to find a rich harvest of mortality among them, were much surprised to find them more healthy than many very clean occupations, but which were conducted in houses instead of in the open air. I have not the statistics before me, but I should not be surprised to learn that that singular race of beings that live in the sewers of Paris were as healthy, if not even more so, than the operatives of some of those exquisitely beautiful, clean, air-tight factories of New England.

There was quite an account made a few years ago of the wonderful cures of consumption that had been performed by the patient being removed to the stable where he could be in close proximity to the cow, and I have no doubt many consumptive patients would find great benefit by such a course of treatment, not that there is any virtue in the smell of the cow, but that the air of the cow-stable would be nearer pure than that of their own chamber.