Advice to a wife and mother in two parts

by Pye Henry Chavasse

VENTILATION—DRAINAGE.

250. Let a lady look well to the ventilation of her house; let her take care that every chimney be unstopped, and during the daytime that every window in every unoccupied room be thrown open.

251. Where there is a skylight at the top of the house, it is well to have it made to open and to shut, so that in the daytime it may, winter and summer, be always open; and in the summer time it may, day and night, be left unclosed. Nothing so thoroughly ventilates and purifies a house as an open skylight.

252. If a lady did but know the importance—the vital importance—of ventilation, she would see that the above directions were carried out to the very letter. My firm belief is that if more attention were paid to ventilation—to thorough ventilation—child-bed fever would be an almost unknown disease.

253. The cooping-up system is abominable; it engenders all manner of infectious and of loathsome diseases, and not only engenders them, but feeds them, and thus keeps them alive. There is nothing wonderful in all this, if we consider but for one moment that the exhalations from the lungs are poisonous! That is to say, that the lungs give off carbonic acid gas (a deadly poison), which, if it be not allowed to escape out of the room, must over and over again be breathed. That if the perspiration of the body (which in twenty-four hours amounts to two or three pounds) be not permitted to escape out of the apartment, must become fetid—repugnant to the nose, sickening to the stomach, and injurious to the health. Oh, how often the nose is a sentinel, and warns its owner of approaching danger!

254. Truly the nose is a sentinel! The Almighty has sent bad smells for our benefit to warn us of danger. If it were not for an unpleasant smell, we should be constantly running into destruction. How often we hear of an ignorant person using disinfectants and fumigations to deprive drains and other horrid places of their odors, as though, if the place could be robbed of its smell, it could be robbed of its danger! Strange infatuation! No; the frequent flushings of drains, the removal of nuisances, cleanliness, a good scrubbing of soap and water, sunshine, and the air and winds of heaven, are the best disinfectants in the world. A celebrated and eccentric lecturer on surgery,[^[58]] in addressing his class, made the following quaint and sensible remark: “Fumigations, gentlemen, are of essential importance; they make so abominable a stink that they compel you to open the windows and admit fresh air.”

255. It is doubtless, then, admirably appointed that, we are able to detect “the well-defined and several stinks;” for the danger is not in them,—to destroy the smell is not to destroy the danger; certainly not! The right way to do away with the danger is to remove the cause, and the effect will cease; flushing a sewer is far more efficacious than disinfecting one; soap and water and the scrubbing-brush, and sunshine and thorough ventilation, each and all are far more beneficial than either permanganate of potash, or chloride of zinc, or chloride of lime. People nowadays think too much of disinfectants and too little of removal of causes; they think too much of artificial, and too little of natural means. It is a sad mistake to lean so much on, and to trust so much to, man’s inventions!

256. What is wanted, nowadays, is a little less theory and a great deal more common sense. A rat, for instance, is, in theory, grossly maligned; he is considered to be very destructive, an enemy to man, and one that ought to be destroyed—every man’s hand being against him. Now, a rat is, by common sense, well known to be, in its proper place—that is to say, in sewers and in drains—destructive only to man’s enemies—to the organic matter that breeds fevers, cholera, diphtheria, etc.; the rat eats the pabulum or food which would otherwise convert towns into hot-beds of terrible diseases. That which is a rat’s food is often a man’s poison; hence a rat is one of the best friends that a man has, and ought, in his proper place, to be in every way protected; the rat, in drains, is the very best of scavengers; in a sewer he is invaluable; in a house he is most injurious; a rat in a sewer is worth gallons of disinfectants, and will, in purifying a sewer, beat all man’s inventions hollow; the maligned rat, therefore, turns out, if weighed by common sense, to be not only one of the most useful of animals, but of public benefactors! The rat’s element, then, is the sewer; he is the king of the sewer, and should there reign supreme, and ought not to be poisoned by horrid disinfectants.

257. If a lady, while on an errand of mercy, should in the morning go into a poor person’s bedroom after he, she, or they (for oftentimes the room is crowded to suffocation) have during the night been sleeping, and where a breath of air is not allowed to enter—the chimney and every crevice having been stopped up—and where too much attention has not been paid to personal cleanliness, she will experience a faintness, an oppression, a sickness, a headache, a terribly fetid smell; indeed, she is in a poisoned chamber! It is an odor sui generis, which must be smelt to be remembered, and will then never be forgotten! Pity the poor who live in such styes—not fit for pigs! For pigs, styes are ventilated. But take warning, ye well-to-do in the world, and look well to your ventilation, or beware of the consequences. “If,” says an able writer on fever in the last century, “any person will take the trouble to stand in the sun and look at his own shadow on a white plastered wall, he will easily perceive that his whole body is a smoking dunghill, with a vapor exhaling from every part of it. This vapor is subtle, acrid, and offensive to the smell; if retained in the body it becomes morbid, but if reabsorbed, highly deleterious. If a number of persons, therefore, are long confined in any close place not properly ventilated, so as to inspire and swallow with their spittle the vapors of each other, they must soon feel its bad effects.”[^[59]]

258. Not only should a lady look well to the ventilation of her house, but either she or her husband ought to ascertain that the drains are in good and perfect order, and that the privies are frequently emptied of their contents. Bad drainage and overflowing privies are fruitful sources of child-bed fever, of gastric fever, of scarlatina, of diphtheria, of cholera, and of a host of other infections and contagious and dangerous diseases. It is an abominable practice to allow dirt to fester near human habitations; more especially as dirt, when mixed with earth, is really so valuable in fertilizing the soil. Lord Palmerston wisely says that “dirt is only matter in the wrong place.”