A handbook of house sanitation : for the use of all persons seeking a healthy home ; a reprint of those portions of Mr. Bailey-Denton's lectures on sanitary engineering given before the school of military engineering, Chatham, which related to the "dwelling."

  • Denton, J. Bailey (John Bailey), 1814-1893.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A handbook of house sanitation : for the use of all persons seeking a healthy home ; a reprint of those portions of Mr. Bailey-Denton's lectures on sanitary engineering given before the school of military engineering, Chatham, which related to the "dwelling.". Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

    23/254 (page 11)
    ^jr/] the site of dwellings. it sewerage. An underground drain (the term being derived from the French trainer) means nothing more or less than a conduit intended to draw out of the land through which it passes the water which is in that land, and, as far as capillary attraction and natural retentiveness will permit, to remove the wetness caused The very reverse is the object of a sewer also derived from a French word, issuer, the precise meaning of which is a conduit for the discharge of filth. A sewer should be used simply as a conduit to discharge its filthy contents as quickly and as completely as possible, without receiving any addition of hquid from the soil through which it passes, or allowing any part of its contents to escape into the soil. It has been the disregard, by engineers and by the draughtsmen of Acts of Parliament, of the true meaning and action of the drain and the sewer which has led to the present inferior condition of town sewerage throughout • the country, and caused the sewage to be diluted by subsoil water by which it has been rendered unmanageable in after treatment. By an appropriate drainage of the ground forming the sites of dwellings, and of towns and villages (which are the congregation of dwellings) not only may the soil be made absorbent of liquid filth, and capable by its aeration of oxidizing the nitrogenous matter which it absorbs, but, by the adoption of adequate depth of drains, the uprising of polluted liquid in the soil, and the consequent evolution of pernicious gases rising by evaporation into the air, and permeating the basements of dwell- ings, may be prevented. Moreover, I believe that as these points are established, and drainage is adopted, we shall go further and acknowledge a sensibly improved temperature of the air as an unmistakable consequence of under-draining the sites of dwellings. If I am right in these views, one of the first duties of the engineer, when carrying out sanitary works, is to render the ground upon which any dwellings stand free from subsoil water to within a recognised depth of their foundations. It is only by such means that the ground is made capable of supporting the incumbent outer air in such a state of purity (as indicated by the amount of carbonic acid it contains) that it shall always be available for the dilution of the air within dwellings. Perhaps the most fruitful source of impurity of air in dwellings is in the damp condition of the ground immediately beneath and adjacent to them, which often becomes saturated with liquid filth by the too frequent practice of throwing the slops of the dwelling upon the surface of yards and gardens, or, what produces nearly as bad a condition, by heaping upon it solid house refuse of all sorts to be washed into the soil by the rainfall, and to give off effluvia from their accumulated heaps or to spread their minute particles in the air, and be taken into the lungs by respiration.