Your country aunt, who has lived over her cooking-stove for years without serious inconvenience, after spending an afternoon in your parlor, heated by a stove or furnace, returns home "glad to get out of that hot, stifling air." And yet the thermometer may have indicated that the kitchen was ten degrees warmer than the parlor. The dry heat of the parlor produced headache, irritability, and perhaps a sense of stricture in the chest. If we would avoid these, a dry chapped skin, an irritable nervous system, and a dry hacking cough, we must add the needed humidity by artificial means.
CLIMATE
The influence of climate in the production of tuberculosis was formerly much exaggerated. Removal to a warm latitude, so generally prescribed some years ago, is now rarely advised. Although the bland atmosphere and out-of-door life of the tropics may often check the progress of the malady, yet the constitution is generally so enervated that the return to home and friends involves often not only a return of the malady, but its more rapid progress. At present, a winter at Lake Superior, or other region where the cold is intense and uniform, is the popular prescription. I do not doubt the value of the expedient in many cases. But the consumptive who can afford a winter neither in the Mediterranean nor at the frigid North may comfort himself that the value of such trips has been greatly overrated. Advice to the phthisical to spend a season a thousand miles from home is, to a large majority of them, not unlike that of the whimsical London doctor to the rag-picker he found coughing in the streets:—"That's a bad cough, a bad cough, you have. I advise you to make a journey on the Continent; and, in order to secure all the advantages, you had better travel in your own carriage." Happily for those with short purses, health in this, as in most other cases, is more easily found at home.
I do not believe that the prejudice against our New-England climate, entertained by consumptives, is well-founded. The slight percentage of difference against us, as compared with the people of other parts of the country, in the number of deaths from consumption, is to be traced, I believe, not so much to our climate as to our manufactories. New England contains nearly all the great factories, labor in which is so prejudicial to health,—as well as a greater number of furnaces, air-tight stoves, and close houses.
I do not believe that the sudden changes of the New-England climate are disastrous to the consumptive who is well protected. While it is true that our climate provokes a greater number of colds than that of Florida, it is not less true that our atmosphere is more invigorating.
"The Climate of the United States," by Dr. Samuel Forry, of the United States Army, one of the best works of the kind ever published, gives a great number of facts, interesting in this connection. His statistics are gathered exclusively from the army. The men of the army are, in great part, of the same age, from the same rank in life, of the same habits, and have the same clothing, food, and labor, and when sick the same treatment. The influence of climate upon human health may, therefore, be ascertained with more accuracy from careful observations among this class of men than from any other source. In comparing the populations of New York and New Orleans, for instance, it is almost impossible to make accurate allowance for the manifold differences in habits, diet, occupation, etc.
Dr. Forry shows conclusively, that, while colds and influenzas are more common in the northern branches of the regular army, as 552 to 271, consumption is more common in the southern, in the proportion of 10-1/2 to 7-2/3. In the southern divisions there are 708 cases of fever of various sorts to 192 in the northern. "We may safely infer," he says, "that whatever tends to impair the constitution, as fevers, tends to develop consumption in every class which is predisposed, and in all climates and countries." Dr. Forry's tables present some curious facts. One which will most impress the general reader is, that rheumatism is more common at Key West than on the coast of New England. But it will not surprise the reflecting, that a change of 5° at Key West is felt as much as one of 20° at Boston. The slight changes, however, do not equally purify the atmosphere and invigorate the body.
DRESS
No subject is so intimately connected with the health of the respiratory apparatus as dress. And, as bearing upon pulmonary consumption, there are certain errors in the dress of children which must be noticed. I believe I echo the voice of my profession, when I declare that the seeds of consumption are planted in thousands by these mistakes in dress during infancy and childhood. To correct these, permit me a few practical suggestions.
The skirt-bands must be left very loose. If you would give the baby's lungs and heart the best chance for development, the dress about the chest and waist should be so loose, that, if the child be held up by the shoulders, its entire dress, except as sustained by the shoulders, will fall to the floor. With such a dress the blood is so much sooner oxygenated, that, other things being equal, the characteristic dark red color of the skin will disappear much sooner than with a close dress.