Respiration and the Voice : Part 3

Hygienic Physiology: with Special Reference to the Use of Alcoholic Drinks and Narcotics
by Joel Dorman Steele, Ph.D.

(Page 6 of 15)

The perfection of ventilation is reached when the air of a room is as pure as that out of doors. To accomplish this result, it is necessary to allow for each person six hundred cubic feet of space, while ventilation is still going on in the best manner known.

In spite of these well-known facts, scarcely any pains are taken to supply fresh air, while the doors and windows where the life-giving oxygen might creep in are hermetically stopped.

How often is this true of the sick room. Yet here the danger of bad air is intensified. The expired breath of the patient is peculiarly threatening to himself as well as to others. Nature is seeking to throw off the poison of the disease. The scavengers of the body are all at work. The breath and the insensible perspiration are loaded with impurities. The odor is oftentimes exceedingly offensive. Sick and well alike need an abundance of fresh air. But, too often, it is the only want not supplied.

Our sitting rooms, heated by furnaces or red-hot stoves, generally have no means of ventilation, or, if provided, they are seldom used. A window is occasionally dropped to give a little relief, as if pure air were a rarity, and must be doled out to the suffering lungs in morsels, instead of full and constant draughts. The inmates are starved by scanty lung food, and stupefied by foul air. The process goes on year by year. The weakened and poisoned body at last succumbs to disease, while we, in our blindness and ignorance, talk of the mysterious Providence which therefore untimely cuts down the brightest intellects. The truth is, death is often simply the penalty for violating nature's laws. Bad air begets disease; disease begets death.

In our churches, the foul air left by the congregation on Sunday is shut up during the week, and heated for the next Lord's day, when the people assemble to rebreathe the polluted atmosphere. They are therefore forced, with every breath they take, to violate the physical laws of Him whom they meet to worship, - laws written not three thousand years ago upon Mount Sinai on tables of stone, but today engraved in the constitution of their own living, breathing bodies. On brains benumbed and starving for oxygen, the purest truth and the highest eloquence fall with little force.

We sleep in a small bedroom from which every breath of fresh air is excluded, because we believe night air to be unhealthy and so we breathe its dozen hogsheads of air over and over again, and then wonder why we awaken in the morning so dull and not refreshed! Return to our room after inhaling the fresh, morning air, and the fetid odor we meet on opening the door, is convincing proof how we have poisoned our lungs during the night.

Each room should be supplied with two thousand feet of fresh air per hour for every person it contains. Our ingenuity ought to find some way of doing this advantageously and pleasantly. A moiety of the care we devote to delicate articles of food, drink, and dress would abundantly meet this prime necessity of our bodies.

Open the windows a little at the top and the bottom. Put on plenty of clothing to keep warm by day and by night, and then let the inspiring oxygen come in as freely as God has given it. Pure air is the cheapest necessity and luxury of life. Let it not be the rarest!

Schoolroom Ventilation. - Who, on going from the open air of a clear, bracing winter's day, into a crowded schoolroom, late in the session, has not noticed the disagreeable odor, and been for a moment nauseated and half stifled by the oppressive atmosphere! It is not strange. See how many causes here combine to pollute the air. If the room is heated by a stove, quantities of carbonic-oxide and carbonic-acid gases, as well as other products of combustion, driven by downward drafts in the flue, escape through seams and cracks and the occasionally opened door of the stove. In the case of a furnace, the same effect is too often experienced, and the odor of coal gas is a common one, especially when the fire is replenished. The insensible perspiration is more active in children than in adults; they, moreover, rush in with their clothing saturated with the perspiration induced by their sports; so that, on the average, each pupil, during school hours, loads the air with about half a pint of aqueous vapor. The children come, oftentimes, from homes that are close, ill- ventilated, and uncleanly; and frequently from sick rooms, bringing in their clothing the germs of disease. Some of the pupils may even bear traces of illness, or have unsound organs, and so their breath and exhalations be poisonous.

In addition to all this, the air is filled with dust brought in and kept astir by many busy feet; with ashes floating from the stove or furnace; and especially with chalk dust. The modern method of teaching requires a large amount of blackboard work, and the air of the schoolroom. I, therefore loaded with chalk particles. These collect in the nasal passages, and the upper part of the larynx, and irritate the membrane, perhaps laying the foundation of catarrh.

The usual schoolroom atmosphere bears in the pupils the natural fruit of frequent headaches, inattention, weariness, and stupor; but in the teacher its frightful influence is most apparent. His labor is severe, his worry of mind is constant, and, when he finishes his day's work, he is generally too tired to take proper physical exercise. He consequently labors on with impaired health, or is forced to abandon his profession.

Instead of six hundred feet of space being allowed for each pupil, as perfect ventilation demands - the lowest estimate being two hundred and fifty feet - often not over one hundred feet are afforded. Instead of two thousand cubic feet of fresh air being supplied every hour for each person, and as much foul air removed, which, all physiologists assert, is needed for perfect health, perhaps no means of ventilation at all are provided, and none is secured except what an occasionally opened door, or the benevolent cracks and chinks in the building furnish the suffering lungs.