Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/231

Rh four walls against wind, rain, and cold; but, now that we employ window-glass, coal for heating, and iron stoves, and rent is becoming higher, while rooms, especially sleeping-rooms, are growing smaller, we have all the greater reason to keep open ventilating apertures, since our lungs cannot live with less than six hundred cubic feet of fresh, pure air per hour. The man who has but once made trial for one week of sleeping with the window open will never give up the practice.

I once spoke to a lady about this matter, but she replied by telling me the story of a "thoughtless person" who, having left the window open through the night, awoke in the morning blind. She had also read in some newspaper that a man had a stroke of apoplexy produced by the same cause. I was amazed. But, calling to mind that this lady's husband had served in the army, I remarked: "Your husband lay for so long in the open air in the rain-drenched trenches at Strasburg; did he ever write to you that he had taken cold, or that any of the men had ever overnight been struck blind, or had met with any other misfortune? Did he ever contract a catarrh? Did he ever write for licorice, and not rather for tobacco? Your brother-in-law tramped in the deep snow to Besoul, your cousin learned at Le Mans what is the meaning of a fall of freezing rain, and thousands of our countrymen have had like experiences; still, coughs and rheumatism were not frequent, and most of the men came back strong and healthy!"

More rational opinions are gradually making their way, and, in one particular at least, a beginning is being made of a revolution, namely, the system of treatment followed in "climatic" sanitariums, and establishments for the cure of disease by air, difference of elevation, etc. The proprietors of such places, it is true, speak of the "specific" virtues of their climate; but, inasmuch as chemistry shows that atmospheric air all over the earth has the same constitution, the specific virtue must reside in the special purity of the air—a thing wanting in cities, but found in all villages, provided they do not possess large factories. Further, it is an error to suppose that in the south—Florida, Colorado, or in the Tyrol, or by the lake of Geneva—it is as warm as in a hot-house. In those regions, too, it is now and then cold; yet it is easier to be out-of-doors there, for usually the sun shines and the landscape is beautiful. But, since we cannot send all the sick to the south, we must devise some substitute at home, the benefits of which may be enjoyed even by the poorest. Then, too, when we consider that the majority of those who have spent the winter in a southern clime return as—embalmed corpses, because it is only when it is too late that people make up their minds to make the costly voyage, there is reason to expect better results from timely recourse at home to "air-cure." With the means of treatment at hand, disease might be nipped in the bud, and lung-complaints in general would be rarer.