Ventilation of Factories and Workshops. This is a subject which demands the immediate attention of manufacturers and employers. The odors of oil, coal gas, and animal products, render the air foul and stagnant, and often give rise to violent diseases among the operatives. From two to four hundred persons are often confined in workshops six hundred feet long, with no means of ventilation except windows on one side only. The air is breathed and re-breathed, until the operatives complain of languor and headache, which they attribute to overwork. The real cause of the headache is the inhalation of foul air at every expansion of the lungs. If the proprietors would provide efficient means for ventilating their workshops, the cost of construction would be repaid with compound interest, in the better health of their operatives and the consequent increase of labor. Our manufacturers must learn and practice the great principle of political economy, namely, that the interests of the laborer and employer are mutual.
Ventilation of our dwellings. Not less important is the ventilation of our dwellings; each apartment should be provided with some channel for the escape of the noxious vapors constantly accumulating. Most of the tenements occupied by the poor of our cities are literally dens of poison. Their children inhale disease with their earliest breath. What wonder that our streets are filled with squalid, wan-visaged children! Charity, indeed, visits these miserable homes, bringing garments and food to their half-famished inmates; but she has been slow to learn that fresh air is just as essential to life as food or clothing. Care should be taken by the public authorities of every city, that its tenement houses do not degenerate into foul hovels, like those of the poor English laborer, so graphically portrayed by Dickens. But ill-ventilated rooms are not found exclusively in the abodes of the poor. True, in the homes of luxury, the effect of vitiated air is modified by food, etc. Men of wealth give far more attention to the architecture and adornment of their houses, to costly decorations and expensive furniture, than to proper ventilation. Farmers, too, are careless in the construction of their cottages. Their dwellings are often built, for convenience, in too close proximity to the barn. Because they do not construct a suitable sewer or drain, the filth and refuse food is thrown out of the back door, where it accumulates and undergoes putrefaction; the vitiated air penetrates the interior of the house, and, there being no means of ventilation, it remains to be breathed by the occupants. The result is, that for the sake of saving a few dollars, which ought to be expended in the construction of necessary flues and sewers, the farmer often sees the child he prizes far more than his broad acres gradually decline, or suddenly fall a victim to fevers or malignant disease. Parents, make your homes healthy, let in the pure, fresh air and bright sunlight, so that your conscience may never upbraid you with being neglectful of the health and lives of your little ones.
SITE FOR HOMES.
Malaria. When about to construct our residences, besides securing proper ventilation and adequate drainage, we ought to select the location for a home on dry soil. Low levels, damp surroundings, and marshy localities not only breed malaria and fevers, but are a prolific cause of colds, coughs, and consumption. Care should be taken not to locate a dwelling where the natural currents of air, or high winds, will be likely to bring the poison of decayed vegetable matter from low lands. Certain brooks, boggy land, ponds, foggy localities, too much shade, all these are favorable to the development of disease. Then the walls of a building should be so constructed as to admit air between the exterior and interior surfaces, otherwise the interior of the house will be damp and unwholesome. In the dead of winter in northern latitudes the house ought to be kept slightly tempered with warmth, both night and day, a condition very favorable to the introduction and change of atmospheric currents. The invigorating tendencies of a dry, pure atmosphere are remarkably beneficial, while air charged with moisture and decay is exceedingly baneful, introducing diseases under various forms.
Neither should the dwelling be shaded by dense foliage. The dampness of the leaves tends to attract malaria. Trees growing a little distance from the house, however, obstruct the transmission of unhealthy vapors arising beyond them. Malaria generally lurks near the surface of the earth, and seems to be more abundant in the night time. Persons sleeping in the upper story of a house may escape its morbid influence, while those occupying apartments on the lower floor, become affected.
DAMP CELLARS.
Damp cellars, under residences, are a fruitful cause of disease. Dr. Sanford B. Hunt, in an article in the Newark Daily Advertiser, speaking of the recent epidemic of diphtheria in New York City, says:
"Pestilences that come bodily, like cholera, are faced and beaten by sanitary measures. Those which come more subtly need for their defeat only a higher detective ability and a closer study of causes, many of which are known, but hidden under the cellars of our houses, and which at last are only preventable by public authority and at public expense in letting out the imprisoned dampness which saturates the earth on which our dwellings are built. Where wood rots, men decay. This is clearly shown in the sanitary map printed in the Times. In the great district surrounding Central Park, and which participates in its drainage system, there are no cases. On the whole line of Fifth Avenue there are none. The exempt districts are clearly defined by the character of the soil, drainage, and sewerage, and by the topography, which either has natural or artificial drainage, but most of which is so dry that only surface-water and house-filth—which does not exist in those palaces—can affect the health of the residents. But in the tenement houses and on the made lands where running streams have been filled in and natural springs choked up by earth fillings, diphtheria finds a nidus in which to develop itself. The sanitary map coincides precisely with the topographic map made by Gen. Viele. Where he locates buried springs and water-courses, there we find the plague spots of diphtheria and in the same places, on previous maps prepared by the Board of Health, we find other low types and stealthy diseases, such as typhoid and irruptive fevers, and there we shall find them again when the summer and autumnal pestilences have yielded place to those which belong to the indoor poisoned air in the winter. The experience of other cities, notably London and Dublin, once plague spots and now as healthy as any spot on earth, proves that most of the causations of disease are within the control of the competent sanitary engineer, even in localities crowded beyond American knowledge, and houses built upon soil saturated for centuries with the offal of successive and uncleanly generations. Wet earth, kept wet by the boiling up of imprisoned springs, is a focus of disease. Dry earth is one of the most perfect deodorizers, the best of oxydizers and absorbents, destroying the germs of disease with wonderful certainty. On those two facts rests the theory of public hygiene."
DUST AND DISEASE.
The air we breathe is heavily loaded with minute particles of floating dust, their presence being revealed only by intense local illumination. Professor Tyndall says: "solar light, in passing through a dark room, reveals its track by illuminating the dust floating in the air. 'The sun,' says Daniel Culverwell, 'discovers atoms, though they be invisible by candle-light, and makes them dance naked in his beams.'"