Consumption and the breath rebreathed : being a sequel to the authors [sic] treatise on consumption / by Henry Mac Cormac.

  • Henry MacCormac
Date:
1872
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Consumption and the breath rebreathed : being a sequel to the authors [sic] treatise on consumption / by Henry Mac Cormac. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    does not know or, knowing, does not care to secure perfectly renewed air, that fluid without which in its purity no living breathing thing can long subsist.* Few indeed feel how essential such air is to the proper permanent maintenance of healthy organic life. The terrible details of the sickening ravages of consumptive tubercular disease, no one can possibly ponder without emotion. No class of the community entirely escapes. Shoal after shoal of victims perishes, to be replaced by yet other shoals to perish and be replaced in their turn. Would only that some diseased and stricken lung, if but for one brief moment, could be held up before those who are so strangely reluctant to admit the advantages and the necessity of a continually renewed perpetually regenerated atmosphere. Ma- terially speaking it is indeed above all things needful, imperatively that air, the same air, shall not be respired oftener than once. Exclusive of out door life and action by day, every provision ought to be made in order that the sleeping chamber atmosphere shall be equal, in point of purity and unpre- breathedness, with that without, so that no portion of it shall, at any time, be respired oftener than once by the occupants. This alone suffices, and less than this will not suffice at all but, hurtful in the first instance, proves destructive in the last. I do not here wish to dilate on the virtues, in every way undoubted, of the allotropic modification of oxygen * Qaatrefag63, Bumbles of a Naluralist, Ottos tr., p. 106.
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