Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/183

Rh whole article would be insufficient to show how knowledge on this subject, not understood in its rudiments fifty years ago, has advanced. Typhus, or ship fever, a disease most easily and directly communicable from person to person, is now known, when it arises spontaneously, to be the fruit of rebreathed air. It formed the "plagues" of the earlier centuries; there are still spots in London—infected houses—from which typhus is never absent, and in 1839 five per cent of the tailors of London died of it; it is to get rid of it, in large measure, that the wholesale demolition of London "rookeries" is at this moment going on. When men ceased to weave in their own unventilated hovels, and were gathered together in high, airy, light factory rooms, it was very soon seen that the number of consumptives, hunchbacks, and bowlegged diminished—an unanswerable testimony to the value of light and air in saving and prolonging lives. When it was shown that the annual death-rate from preventable typhus, which attacked persons in the vigor of life, was double that of the allied armies at Waterloo, England began to suspect that there was a commercial value to a man's life, and enacted laws for its protection; indeed, public sentiment on this matter has become so educated that no employer would dare to crowd eighty workmen into a space where the "cubic feet of air" to each was less than one hundred feet—less than one tenth of that required for healthful breathing. The reduction of the deaths of children in a single hospital, by having it well ventilated, from 2,944 out of a total of 7,050 down to 279, convinced the most stolid conservative that "there was something in it." It seems to an intelligent person of to-day as if everybody, everywhere, and all the time had understood the importance of pure air; but when it is remembered that the constitution of the atmosphere has been known only a little more than a hundred years, and the vital relations of oxygen to the human blood for a much shorter period, it will be seen that the idea is wide of the fact.

Systematic sanitation began in England about fifty years ago; in America about twenty—the first State Board of Health made its first report in 1870; but thoroughly informed persons declare that among our more plastic populations, where ideas do not encounter so many vested abuses and prejudices, they have made such rapid headway that we are already abreast of the most advanced sanitary thought of Europe; some of the new Western towns have sprung, like Minerva, in full completeness, from their creators, with entire equipment of pure water-supply, perfect drainage, electric lights, and houses built on the most healthful models.

The site of the dwelling has become an object of prime importance, and public opinion has forbidden the use of swamps