On breathing and ventilation / by Alfred Schofield.

Alfred Taylor Schofield

Date:: [1890?]

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On breathing and ventilation / by Alfred Schofield. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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is so necessary to the health of a well-nurtured body, chills the half-starved, ill-clad frames of men and women whose homes have been described.’’ The simple truth is this. The poor find out that by far the cheapest way of warming a room is by their own breath, and they therefore stuff up every crack and crevice, close door and window, and crowd closely together, rigorously keeping out that on which their very life depends—pure air; and were it not for the chimneys in most rooms, deaths directly from this cause would be far commoner than they are. Even at sea some of the foulest air in the world is to be found in the seamen’s cabins in the forecastle, which are warmed by the same poisonous means. The difference between pure warm air and foul warm air, cannot be too strongly insisted on, and the fatal effects of living or sleeping in close rooms, warmed by the heat of one’s own poisonous breath, too plainly pointed out. Warmed by our own Breath. It is on this account that people will not willingly submit to have their rooms ventilated. In one or two workshops in the City where large numbers of girls were employed, and the atmosphere was found to be intolerably close, a beautiful system of directly introducing fresh air, by means of Tobin’s tubes, was arranged at great expense, but was soon found to be useless, because the girls would persist in stopping up the mouths of the tubes with bits of rag, &c. These girls had no wish to commit suicide, but were determined to be kept warm, and the only way to reconcile them to the necessity of breathing pure air, would be at the same time to heat the room artificially to supply the place of the hot poisonous breath. It is a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence, and the worst is that those who need this pure air most, are