Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/199

 I hold that the breathing of impure air is a fruitful source of disease of the right heart occurring after middle age. How many people ignorantly favor its occurrence by confining themselves to closely-shut, non-ventilated, hot, stifling rooms, in which the carbonic acid has accumulated to 2 or 3 per cent. of the air they respire! How many are thus destroyed by being compelled, through the exigencies of life, to pass the greater part of their time in pits and manufactories where ventilation is defective, or in which the air respired is poisoned by noxious fumes and offensive emanations from the materials undergoing the process of manufacture! How many are falling victims to the poisonous influence upon the heart of the atmosphere of an underground railway! What do these facts suggest? How are these evil results to be prevented? The simple answer is—Let the rooms in which you live be effectually ventilated by an incoming current of air filtered from all adventitious impurities, and so divided that no draught shall be felt; and by an outgoing current which shall remove from the apartments the carbonic acid, carbonic oxide, sulphurous-acid gas, sulphuretted hydrogen, and other noxious compounds, as rapidly as they are generated. Apply the same principle to public buildings, theatres, schools, manufactories, pits, and to all places in which people are accustomed to congregate.

As to underground railways, the best plan is to avoid them. True, the time passed in their polluted atmosphere is usually very short; but it is, nevertheless, sufficiently long to paralyze occasionally the heart's action, and always, by its pollution of the blood and by its direct effect upon the nervous system, to favor degeneration of the structures of the heart.

It often occurs to a medical man to visit a patient for the first time, and to find him suffering from a dilated right heart. He may for some short time have been sensible of a change in his breathing on walking rather quickly, or in mounting the stairs, or he may never have felt, or at least recognized, any such sensations. His attention was first arrested by observing that his feet and ankles were swollen, especially at night on going to bed. This sign it is which gives him the first alarm, and which causes him to seek the aid of his physician. An examination of his case detects a dilated right heart, with incompetency of the tricuspid valve. How has this condition of the heart been brought about? There is no history of previous cardiac disease; there has been no illness ushering in the present condition of things; there has never been, nor is there now, any affection of the lungs, and yet the right heart has suffered a lesion fatal to life! The answer is, that every such case has passed the age of forty, that the tissues of the right heart have entered upon the period of degeneration, and that this degeneration has, with very few exceptions, been hastened by the breathing of an impure air, either during the pursuit of the ordinary occupations of life, or in the patient's own dwelling.