But when a draft blows through a hole,
Make your will and mend your soul.
Pure superstition! It just shows what's in a name. Call it a gentle breeze, or a current of fresh air, and no one is afraid of it. Call it a "draft," and up go hands and eyebrows in horror at once. One of our highest authorities on diseases of the lungs, Dr. Norman Bridge, has well dubbed it "The Draft Fetich." It is a fetich, and as murderous as Moloch. The draft is a friend instead of an enemy. What converted most of us to a belief in the beneficence of drafts was the open-air treatment of consumption! Hardly could there have been a more spectacular proof, a more dramatic defiance of the bogey. To make a poor, wasted, shivering consumptive, in a hectic one hour and a drenching sweat the next, lie out exposed to the November weather all day and sleep in a ten-knot gale at night! It looked little short of murder! So much so to some of us, that we decided to test it on ourselves before risking our patients.
I can still vividly recall the astonishment with which I woke one frosty December morning, after sleeping all night in a breeze across my head that literally made
Each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine,
not only without the sign of a sniffle, but feeling as if I'd been made new while I slept.
Then we tried it in fear and trembling on our patients, and the delight of seeing the magic it worked! That is an old story now, but it has never lost its charm. To see the cough which has defied "dopes" and syrups and cough mixtures, domestic, patent, and professional, for months, subside and disappear in from three to ten days; the night sweats dry up within a week; the appetite come back; the fever fall; the strength and color return, as from the magic kiss of the free air of the woods, the prairies, the seacoast. There's nothing else quite like it on the green earth. Do you wonder that we become "fresh-air fiends"?
The only thing we dread in these camps is the imported "cold." Dr. Lawrence Flick was the first to show us the way in this respect as in several others. He put up a big sign at the entrance of White Haven Sanatorium, "No persons suffering from colds allowed to enter," and traced the only epidemic of colds in the sanatorium to the visit of a butcher with the grip. I put up a similar sign at the gate of my Oregon camp, and never had a patient catch cold from tenting out in the snow and "Oregon mists" until the small son of the cook came back from the village school, shivering and sneezing, when seven of the thirteen patients "caught it" within a week.
What will cure a consumptive will surely not kill a healthy man. I am delighted to say that it shows signs of becoming a fad now, and sleeping porches are being put on houses all over the country. No house in California is considered complete without them. The ideal bedroom is a small dressing-room, opening on a wide screened porch, or balcony, with a door wide enough to allow the bed to be rolled inside during storms or in severest weather.
Sleep on a porch, or in a room with windows on two sides wide open, and the average living-room or office begins to feel stuffy and "smothery" at once. Apply the same treatment here. Learn to sit in a gentle draft, and you'll avoid two-thirds of your colds and three-fourths of your headaches. It may be necessary in winter to warm the draft, but don't let any patent method of ventilation delude you into keeping your windows shut any hour of the day or night.
On the other hand, don't fall into the widespread delusion that because air is cold it is necessarily pure. Some of the vilest air imaginable is that shut up in those sepulchres known as "best bedrooms," which chill your very marrow. The rheumatism or snuffles you get from sleeping between their icy sheets comes from the crop of bacilli which has lurked there since they were last aired. The "no heat in a bedroom" dogma is little better than superstition, born of those fecund parents which mate so often, stinginess and puritanism. Practically, the room which will never have a window opened in it in winter is the one without any heat.