Hospital plans : five essays relating to the construction, organization & management of hospitals / contributed by their authors for the use of the Johns Hopkins hospital of Baltimore.

Johns Hopkins Hospital

Date:: 1875

Credit: Hospital plans : five essays relating to the construction, organization & management of hospitals / contributed by their authors for the use of the Johns Hopkins hospital of Baltimore. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$ment to be considered in the soil of the site of dwellings. If the soil near or more remote from buildings contains organic matters which are emitting deleterious gases, these emanations are readily carried by underground currents and discharged into any receptacle to which the air is drawn by difference of temper- ature. * These receptacles may be the heated basements of dwellings, and thus the dwelling may become a foul air shaft for the discharge of the ground air, loaded with carbonic acid gas and other dangerous impurities, f The effects of these emanations from the soil upon the health of residents is most disastrous. The malarial poisons may be of a kind which insidiously impau' the constitution, and cause per- manent ill-health, and premature decay and death, without even a suspicion of their source. Persons thus chronically poisoned fall an easy prey to other exciting causes of disease, intensified by these existing agents of ill-health, or convalesce with great difficulty. X Or again, the ground air may convey into dwellings the active germs of diseases which, in due time, produce their legitimate fruits. There is reason to believe that typhoid fever, cliolera, and diarrhceal diseases may be introduced from the soils to the interior of dwellings, and their local origin escape detection. § It is evident, therefore, that too much importance cannot be attached to those measures which protect dwellings from the evil effects of ground air. * Remarkable testimony as to the permeability of the ground, and of the foundation of our houses, has been given by gas emanations into houses which had no gas laid on. I know oases where persons were poisoned and killed by gas, which had to travel for twenty feet under the street, and then through the foundations, cellar-vaults, and flooring of the ground-floor rooms.—Pettenkoper, op. cit. \ [Thus our heated houses veutOate themselves not only through the walls but also through the ground on which the house stands. If there is any gas or other smell- ing substance in the surrounding ground air, they will enter the cuiTent of this venti- lation. I have witnessed a case in Munich, where not the least smell of gas could be detected in the street, but a great quantity of gas found its way into the ground-floor room of a house where no gas was laid on.]—Pettenkofeu, op. cit. J . . . They may (lodgers brought in by ground air), without betraying their pre- sence in any way, become enemies, or associate themselves with other injurious ele- ments, and increase their activity.—Pettenkofer, op. cit. § In another case the gas (from pipes in the neighboring ground) penetrated into the best heated room, and produced an illness of its inmates, which was taken for typhoid fever.—Pettenkofer, op. cit.$