Health resorts and their uses : being vacation studies in various health resorts / Yeo Isaac Burney.

  • Isaac Burney Yeo
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Health resorts and their uses : being vacation studies in various health resorts / Yeo Isaac Burney. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    These observations appear to justify the following inference : Since the activity of tissue-changes will correspond with the loss of heat, the greater the loss of heat the greater will be the activity of change of tissue, i.e. the greater the stimulus to nutritive changes. Hence in mountain air these nutritive changes are comparatively much less active than on the shore of the North Sea. And Professor Beneke's practical con- clusions are that individuals in whom the processes of tissue-change do not require hastening are, cceteris paribus, better off on mountain heights than on the seacoast. Highly irritable, nervous organisations, people who, as we say, take too much out of them- selves, profit more by mountain than by sea air. For those, on the contrary, who have no tendency to nervous irritability, and who are in a condition to bear the increased stimulus to tissue-change, sea air is a more powerful restorative agent. Hence the greater proportion of scrofulous persons and those exhausted by overwork, who retain some activity of the digestive organs, should prefer the seaside. But although these general conclusions of Professor Beneke's are probably in the main correct, there are many other considerations to be attended to in deter- mining the relative value, in individual instances, of sea and mountain air. I have, however, thought it ad- visable to call attention, at some length, to these really valuable observations and suggestions of Beneke, as they are almost the only experimental researches that have been hitherto published on this interesting and important practical question: I shall now proceed, in the first place, to consider in detail what are those properties of sea air to which it owes its special influence on the human organism. The presence of ozone in sea air in greater proportion than in the air of inland plains is well established. This is a property which it shares with mountain air. Its greater abundance on the seacoast depends, in all probability, on the influence of sunlight, which is one of the most important sources of ozone. Vegetation