A Healthy Home : Part 3

American Woman's Home
by Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe

(Page 6 of 43)

"We hear of the lean condition in which the poor bears emerge from their six months' wintering, during which they subsist on the fat which they have acquired the previous summer. Even so, in our long winters, multitudes of delicate people subsist on the daily waning strength which they acquired in the season when windows and doors were open and fresh air was a constant luxury. No wonder we hear of spring fever and spring biliousness and have thousands of nostrums for clearing the blood in the spring. All these things are the pantings and palpitations of a system run down under slow poison, unable to get a step further.

"Better, far better, the old houses of the olden time, with their great roaring fires and their bed-rooms where the snow came in and the wintry winds whistled. Then, to be sure, you froze your back while you burned your face, your water froze nightly in your pitcher, your breath congealed in ice-wreaths on the blankets and you could write your name on the pretty snow-wreath that had sifted in through the window-cracks. But you woke full of life and vigor, you looked out into the whirling snow-storms without a shiver and thought nothing of plunging through drifts as high as your head on your daily way to school. You jingled in sleighs, you snow-balled, you lived in snow like a snow-bird and your blood coursed and tingled, in full tide of good, merry, real life, through your veins - none of the slow-creeping, black blood which clogs the brain and lies like a weight on the vital wheels!"

To illustrate the effects of this poison, the horrors of "the Black Hole of Calcutta" are often referred to, where one hundred and forty-six men were crowded into a room only eighteen feet square with but two small windows and in a hot climate. After a night of such horrible torments as chill the blood to read, the morning showed a pile of one hundred and twenty-three dead men and twenty-three half dead that were finally recovered only to a life of weakness and suffering.

In another case, a captain of the steamer Londonderry, in 1848, from sheer ignorance of the consequences, in a storm, shut up his passengers in a tight room without windows. The agonies, groans, curses and shrieks that followed were horrible. The struggling mass finally burst the door and the captain found seventy-two of the two hundred already dead; while others, with blood starting from their eyes and ears and their bodies in convulsions, were restored, many only to a life of sickness and debility.

It is ascertained by experiments that breathing bad air tends so to reduce all the processes of the body, that less oxygen is demanded and less carbonic acid sent out. This, of course, lessens the vitality and weakens the constitution; and it accounts for the fact that a person of full health, accustomed to pure air, suffers from bad air far more than those who are accustomed to it. The body of strong and healthy persons demands more oxygen and throws off more carbonic acid and is distressed when the supply fails. But the one reduced by bad air feels little inconvenience, because all the functions of life are so slow that less oxygen is needed and less carbonic acid thrown out. And the sensibilities being deadened, the evil is not felt. This provision of nature prolongs many lives, though it turns vigorous constitutions into feeble ones. Were it not for this change in the constitution, thousands in badly ventilated rooms and houses would come to a speedy death.

One of the results of unventilated rooms is scrofula, A distinguished French physician, M. Baudeloque, states that:

"The repeated respiration of the same atmosphere is the cause of scrofula. If there be entirely pure air, there may be bad food, bad clothing and want of personal cleanliness, but scrofulous disease can not exist. This disease never attacks persons who pass their lives in the open air and always manifests itself when they abide in air which is unrenewed. Invariably it will be found that a truly scrofulous disease is caused by vitiated air; and it is not necessary that there should be a prolonged stay in such an atmosphere. Often, several hours each day is sufficient. Therefore persons may live in the most healthy country, pass most of the day in the open air and yet become scrofulous by sleeping in a close room where the air is not renewed. This is the case with many shepherds who pass their nights in small huts with no opening but a door closed tight at night."

The same writer illustrates this, by the history of a French village where the inhabitants all slept in close, unventilated houses. Nearly all were seized with scrofula and many families became wholly extinct, their last members dying "rotten with scrofula." A fire destroyed a large part of this village. Houses were then built to secure pure air and scrofula disappeared from the part therefore rebuilt.

We are informed by medical writers that defective ventilation is one great cause of diseased joints, as well as of diseases of the eyes, ears and skin.

Foul air is the leading cause of tubercular and scrofulous consumption, so very common in our country. Dr, Guy, in his examination before public health commissioners in Great Britain, says: "Deficient ventilation I believe to be more fatal than all other causes put together." He states that consumption is twice as common among tradesmen as among the gentry, owing to the bad ventilation of their stores and dwellings.

Dr. Griscom, in his work on Uses and Abuses of Air, says:

"Food carried from the stomach to the blood can not become nutritive till it is properly oxygenated in the lungs; so that a small quantity of food, even if less wholesome, may be made nutritive by pure air as it passes through the lungs. But the best of food can not be changed into nutritive blood till it is vitalized by pure air in the lungs."

And again:

"To those who have the care and instruction of the rising generation - the future fathers and mothers of men - this subject of ventilation commends itself with an interest surpassing every other. Nothing can more convincingly establish the belief in the existence of something vitally wrong in the habits and circumstances of civilized life than the appalling fact that one fourth of all who are born die before reaching the fifth year and one half the deaths of mankind occur under the twentieth year. Let those who have these things in charge answer to their own consciences how they discharge their duty in supplying to the young a pure atmosphere, which is the first requisite for healthy bodies and sound minds."

About the Author

Catharine Esther Beecher (1800 - 1878) was a noted educator, renowned for her forthright opinions on women's education as well as her vehement support of the many benefits of the incorporation of a kindergarten into children's education.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811 - 1896) was a white American abolitionist and novelist, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin attacked the cruelty of slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential, even in Britain.