A HEALTHFUL HOME




III.

A HEALTHFUL HOME.


When "the wise woman buildeth her house," the first consideration will
be the health of the inmates. The first and most indispensable requisite
for health is pure air, both by day and night.

If the parents of a family should daily withhold from their children
a large portion of food needful to growth and health, and every night
should administer to each a small dose of poison, it would be called
murder of the most hideous character. But it is probable that more
than one half of this nation are doing that very thing. The murderous
operation is perpetrated daily and nightly, in our parlors, our
bed-rooms, our kitchens, our schoolrooms; and even our churches are
no asylum from the barbarity. Nor can we escape by our railroads, for
even there the same dreadful work is going on.

The only palliating circumstance is the ignorance of those who commit
these wholesale murders. As saith the Scripture, "The people do perish
for lack of knowledge." And it is this lack of knowledge which it is
woman's special business to supply, in first training her household
to intelligence as the indispensable road to virtue and happiness.

The above statements will be illustrated by some account of the manner
in which the body is supplied with healthful nutriment. There are two
modes of nourishing the body, one is by food and the other by air. In
the stomach the food is dissolved, and the nutritious portion is
absorbed by the blood, and then is earned by blood-vessels to the
lungs, where it receives oxygen from the air we breathe. This oxygen
is as necessary to the nourishment of the body as the food for the
stomach. In a full-grown man weighing one hundred and fifty-four pounds,
one hundred and eleven pounds consists of oxygen, obtained chiefly
from the air we breathe. Thus the lungs feed the body with oxygen, as
really as the stomach supplies the other food required.

The lungs occupy the upper portion of the body from the collar-bone
to the lower ribs, and between their two lobes is placed the heart.

[Illustration: Fig. 22.]
[Illustration: Fig. 23.]
[Illustration: Fig. 24.]
[Illustration: Fig. 25.]
[Illustration: Fig. 26.]

Fig. 22 shows the position of the lungs, though not the exact shape.
On the right hand is the exterior of one of the lobes, and on the left
hand are seen the branching tubes of the interior, through which the
air we breathe passes to the exceedingly minute air-cells of which the
lungs chiefly consist. Fig. 23 shows the outside of a cluster of these
air-cells, and Fig. 24 is the inside view. The lining membrane of each
air-cell is covered by a network of minute blood-vessels called
_capillaries_ which, magnified several hundred times, appear in the
microscope as at Fig. 25. Every air-cell has a blood-vessel that brings
blood from the heart, which meanders through its capillaries till it
reaches another blood-vessel that carries it back to the heart, as
seen in Fig. 26. In this passage of the blood through these capillaries,
the air in the air-cell imparts its oxygen to the blood, and receives
in exchange carbonic acid and watery vapor. These latter are expired
at every breath into the atmosphere.

By calculating the number of air cells in a small portion of the lungs,
under a microscope, it is ascertained that there are no less than
eighteen million of these wonderful little purifiers and feeders of
the body. By their ceaseless ministries, every grown person receives,
each day, thirty-three hogsheads of air into the lungs to nourish and
vitalize every part of the body, and also to carry off its impurities.

But the heart has a most important agency in this operation. Fig. 27
is a diagram of the heart, which is placed between the two lobes of
the lungs. The right side of the heart receives the dark and impure
blood, which is loaded with carbonic acid. It is brought from every
point of the body by branching veins that unite in the upper and the
lower _vena cava_, which discharge into the right side of the heart.
This impure blood passes to the capillaries of the air-cells in the
lungs, where it gives off carbonic acid, and, taking oxygen from the
air, then returns to the left side of the heart, from whence it is sent
out through the _aorta_ and its myriad branching arteries to every part
of the body. When the upper portion of the heart contracts, it forces
both the pure blood from the lungs, and the impure blood from the body,
through the valves marked V, V, into the lower part. When the lower
portion contracts, it closes the valves and forces the impure blood into
the lungs on one side, and also on the other side forces the purified
blood through the aorta and arteries to all parts of the body.

As before stated, the lungs consist chiefly of air-cells, the walls
of which are lined with minute blood-vessels; and we know that in every
man these air-cells number _eighteen millions_.

Now every beat of the heart sends two ounces of blood into the minute,
hair-like blood-vessels, called capillaries, that line these air-cells,
where the air in the air-cells gives its oxygen to the blood, and in
its place receives carbonic acid. This gas is then expired by the lungs
into the surrounding atmosphere.

Thus, by this powerful little organ, the heart, no less than
twenty-eight pounds of blood, in a common-sized man, is sent three
times every hour through the lungs, giving out carbonic acid and watery
vapor, and receiving the life-inspiring oxygen.

Whether all this blood shall convey the nourishing and invigorating
oxygen to every part of the body, or return unrelieved of carbonic
acid, depends entirely on the pureness of the atmosphere that is
breathed.

Every time we think or feel, this mental action dissolves some particles
of the brain and nerves, which pass into the blood to be thrown out
of the body through the lungs and skin. In like manner, whenever we
move any muscle, some of its particles decay and pass away. It is in
the capillaries, which are all over the body, that this change takes
place. The blood-vessels that convey the pure blood from the heart,
divide into myriads of little branches that terminate in capillary
vessels like those lining the air-cells of the lungs. The blood meanders
through these minute capillaries, depositing the oxygen taken from the
lungs and the food of the stomach, and receiving in return the decayed
matter, which is chiefly carbonic acid.

This carbonic acid is formed by the union of oxygen with _carbon_ or
_charcoal_, which forms a large portion of the body. Watery vapor is
also formed in the capillaries by the union of oxygen with the hydrogen
contained in the food and drink that nourish the body.

During this process in the capillaries, the bright red blood of the
arteries changes to the purple blood of the veins, which is carried
back to the heart, to be sent to the lungs as before described. A
portion of the oxygen received in the lungs unites with the dissolved
food sent from the stomach into the blood, and no food can nourish the
body till it has received a proper supply of oxygen in the lungs. At
every breath a half-pint of blood receives its needed oxygen in the
lungs, and at the same time gives out an equal amount of carbonic acid
and water.

Now, this carbonic acid, if received into the lungs, undiluted by
sufficient air, is a fatal poison, causing certain death. When it is
mixed with only a small portion of air, it is a slow poison, which
imperceptibly undermines the constitution.

We now can understand how it is that all who live in houses where the
breathing of inmates has deprived the air of oxygen, and loaded it
with carbonic acid, may truly be said to be poisoned and starved;
poisoned with carbonic acid, and starved for want of oxygen.

Whenever oxygen unites with carbon to form carbonic acid, or with
hydrogen to form water, heat is generated Thus it is that a land of
combustion is constantly going on in the capillaries all over the body.
It is this burning of the decaying portions of the body that causes
animal heat. It is a process similar to that which takes place when
lamps and candles are burning. The oil and tallows which are chiefly
carbon and hydrogen, unite with the oxygen of the air and form carbonic
acid and watery vapor, producing heat during the process. So in the
capillaries all over the body, the carbon and hydrogen supplied to the
blood by the stomach, unite with the oxygen gained in the lungs, and
cause the heat which is diffused all over the body.

The skin also performs an office, similar to that of the lungs. In the
skin of every adult there are no less than seven million minute
perspirating tubes, each one fourth of an inch long. If all these were
united in one length, they would extend twenty-eight miles. These
minute tubes are lined with capillary blood-vessels, which are
constantly sending out not only carbonic acid, but other gases and
particles of decayed matter. The skin and lungs together, in one day
and night, throw out three quarters of a pound of charcoal as carbonic
acid, beside other gases and water.

While the bodies of men and animals are filling the air with the
poisonous carbonic acid, and using up the life-giving oxygen, the trees
and plants are performing an exactly contrary process; for they are
absorbing carbonic acid and giving out oxygen. Thus, by a wonderful
arrangement of the beneficent Creator, a constant equilibrium is
preserved. What animals use is provided by vegetables, and what
vegetables require is furnished by animals; and all goes on, day and
night, without care or thought of man.

The human race in its infancy was placed in a mild and genial clime,
where each separate family dwelt in tents, and breathed, both day and
night, the pure air of heaven. And when they became scattered abroad
to colder climes, the open fire-place secured a full supply of pure
air. But civilization has increased economies and conveniences far
ahead of the knowledge needed by the common people for their healthful
use. Tight sleeping-rooms, and close, air-tight stoves, are now starving
and poisoning more than one half of this nation. It seems impossible
to make people know their danger. And the remedy for this is the light
of knowledge and intelligence which it is woman's special mission to
bestow, as she controls and regulates the ministries of a home.

The poisoning process is thus exhibited in Mrs. Stowe's "House and
Home Papers," and can not be recalled too often:

"No other gift of God, so precious, so inspiring, is treated with such
utter irreverence and contempt in the calculations of us mortals as
this same air of heaven. A sermon on oxygen, if we had a preacher who
understood the subject, might do more to repress sin than the most
orthodox discourse to show when and how and why sin came. A minister
gets up in a crowded lecture-room, where the mephitic air almost makes
the candles burn blue, and bewails the deadness of the church--the
church the while, drugged by the poisoned air, growing sleepier and
sleepier, though they feel dreadfully wicked for being so.

"Little Jim, who, fresh from his afternoon's ramble in the fields,
last evening said his prayers dutifully, and lay down to sleep in a
most Christian frame, this morning sits up in bed with his hair
bristling with crossness, strikes at his nurse, and declares he won't
say his prayers--that he don't want to be good. The simple difference
is, that the child, having slept in a close box of a room, his brain
all night fed by poison, is in a mild state of moral insanity. Delicate
women remark that it takes them till eleven or twelve o'clock to get
up their strength in the morning. Query, Do they sleep with closed
windows and doors, and with heavy bed-curtains?

"The houses built by our ancestors were better ventilated in certain
respects than modern ones, with all their improvements. The great
central chimney, with its open fire-places in the different rooms,
created a constant current which carried off foul and vitiated air.
In these days, how common is it to provide rooms with only a flue for
a stove! This flue is kept shut in summer, and in winter opened only
to admit a close stove, which burns away the vital portion of the air
quite as fast as the occupants breathe it away. The sealing up of
fire-places and introduction of air-tight stoves may, doubtless, be
a saving of fuel; it saves, too, more than that; in thousands and
thousands of cases it has saved people from all further human wants,
and put an end forever to any needs short of the six feet of narrow
earth which are man's only inalienable property. In other words, since
the invention of air-tight stoves, thousands have died of slow poison.

"It is a terrible thing to reflect upon, that our northern winters
last from November to May, six long months, in which many families
confine themselves to one room, of which every window-crack has been
carefully calked to make it air-tight, where an air-tight stove keeps
the atmosphere at a temperature between eighty and ninety; and the
inmates, sitting there with all their winter clothes on, become
enervated both by the heat and by the poisoned air, for which there
is no escape but the occasional opening of a door.

"It is no wonder that the first result of all this is such a delicacy
of skin and lungs that about half the inmates are obliged to give up
going into the open air during the six cold months, because they
invariably catch cold if they do so. It is no wonder that the cold
caught about the first of December has by the first of March become
a fixed consumption, and that the opening of the spring, which ought
to bring life and health, in so many cases brings death.

"We hear of the lean condition in which the poor bears emerge from
their six months' wintering, during which they subsist on the fat which
they have acquired the previous summer. Even so, in our long winters,
multitudes of delicate people subsist on the daily waning strength
which they acquired in the season when windows and doors were open,
and fresh air was a constant luxury. No wonder we hear of spring fever
and spring biliousness, and have thousands of nostrums for clearing
the blood in the spring. All these things are the pantings and
palpitations of a system run down under slow poison, unable to get a
step further.

"Better, far better, the old houses of the olden time, with their great
roaring fires, and their bed-rooms where the snow came in and the
wintry winds whistled. Then, to be sure, you froze your back while you
burned your face, your water froze nightly in your pitcher, your breath
congealed in ice-wreaths on the blankets, and you could write your
name on the pretty snow-wreath that had sifted in through the
window-cracks. But you woke full of life and vigor, you looked out
into the whirling snow-storms without a shiver, and thought nothing
of plunging through drifts as high as your head on your daily way to
school. You jingled in sleighs, you snow-balled, you lived in snow
like a snow-bird, and your blood coursed and tingled, in full tide of
good, merry, real life, through your veins--none of the slow-creeping,
black blood which clogs the brain and lies like a weight on the vital
wheels!"

To illustrate the effects of this poison, the horrors of "the Black
Hole of Calcutta" are often referred to, where one hundred and forty-six
men were crowded into a room only eighteen feet square with but two
small windows, and in a hot climate. After a night of such horrible
torments as chill the blood to read, the morning showed a pile of one
hundred and twenty-three dead men and twenty-three half dead that were
finally recovered only to a life of weakness and suffering.

In another case, a captain of the steamer Londonderry, in 1848, from
sheer ignorance of the consequences, in a storm, shut up his passengers
in a tight room without windows. The agonies, groans, curses, and
shrieks that followed were horrible. The struggling mass finally burst
the door, and the captain found seventy-two of the two hundred already
dead; while others, with blood starting from their eyes and ears, and
their bodies in convulsions, were restored, many only to a life of
sickness and debility.

It is ascertained by experiments that breathing bad air tends so to
reduce all the processes of the body, that less oxygen is demanded and
less carbonic acid sent out. This, of course, lessens the vitality and
weakens the constitution; and it accounts for the fact that a person
of full health, accustomed to pure air, suffers from bad air far more
than those who are accustomed to it. The body of strong and healthy
persons demands more oxygen, and throws off more carbonic acid, and
is distressed when the supply fails. But the one reduced by bad air
feels little inconvenience, because all the functions of life are so
slow that less oxygen is needed, and less carbonic acid thrown out.
And the sensibilities being deadened, the evil is not felt. This
provision of nature prolongs many lives, though it turns vigorous
constitutions into feeble ones. Were it not for this change in the
constitution, thousands in badly ventilated rooms and houses would
come to a speedy death.

One of the results of unventilated rooms is _scrofula_, A distinguished
French physician, M. Baudeloque, states that:

"The repeated respiration of the same atmosphere is _the_ cause of
scrofula. If there be entirely pure air, there may be bad food, bad
clothing, and want of personal cleanliness, but scrofulous disease can
not exist. This disease _never_ attacks persons who pass their lives in
the open air, and always manifests itself when they abide in air which
is unrenewed. _Invariably_ it will be found that a truly scrofulous
disease is caused by vitiated air; and it is not necessary that there
should be a prolonged stay in such an atmosphere. Often, several hours
each day is sufficient. Thus persons may live in the most healthy
country, pass most of the day in the open air, and yet become scrofulous
by sleeping in a close room where the air is not renewed. This is the
case with many shepherds who pass their nights in small huts with no
opening but a door closed tight at night."

The same writer illustrates this, by the history of a French village
where the inhabitants all slept in close, unventilated houses. Nearly
all were seized with scrofula, and many families became wholly extinct,
their last members dying "rotten with scrofula." A fire destroyed a
large part of this village. Houses were then built to secure pure air,
and scrofula disappeared from the part thus rebuilt.

We are informed by medical writers that defective ventilation is one
great cause of diseased joints, as well as of diseases of the eyes,
ears, and skin.

Foul air is the leading cause of tubercular and scrofulous consumption,
so very common in our country. Dr, Guy, in his examination before
public health commissioners in Great Britain, says: "Deficient
ventilation I believe to be more fatal than _all other causes_ put
together." He states that consumption is twice as common among
tradesmen as among the gentry, owing to the bad ventilation of their
stores and dwellings.

Dr. Griscom, in his work on Uses and Abuses of Air, says:

"Food carried from the stomach to the blood can not become _nutritive_
till it is properly oxygenated in the lungs; so that a small quantity of
food, even if less wholesome, may be made nutritive by pure air as it
passes through the lungs. But the best of food can not be changed into
nutritive blood till it is vitalized by pure air in the lungs."

And again:

"To those who have the care and instruction of the rising
generation--the future fathers and mothers of men--this subject of
ventilation commends itself with an interest surpassing every other.
Nothing can more convincingly establish the belief in the existence
of something vitally wrong in the habits and circumstances of civilized
life than the appalling fact that _one fourth_ of all who are born die
before reaching the fifth year, and _one half_ the deaths of mankind
occur under the twentieth year. Let those who have these things in
charge answer to their own consciences how they discharge their duty in
supplying to the young a _pure atmosphere_, which is the _first_
requisite for _healthy bodies_ and _sound minds_."

On the subject of infant mortality the experience of savages should
teach the more civilized. Professor Brewer, who traveled extensively
among the Indians of our western territories, states: "I have rarely
seen a sick boy among the Indians." Catlin, the painter, who resided
and traveled so much among these people, states that infant mortality
is very small among them, the reason, of course, being abundant exercise
and pure air.

Dr. Dio Lewis, whose labors in the cause of health are well known, in
his very useful work, _Weak Lungs and How to Make them Strong_, says:

"As a medical man I have visited thousands of sickrooms, and have not
found in _one in a hundred_ of them a pure atmosphere. I have often
returned from church doubting whether I had not committed a sin in
exposing myself so long to its poisonous air. There are in our great
cities churches costing $50,000, in the construction of which, not
fifty cents were expended in providing means for ventilation. Ten
thousand dollars for ornament, but not ten cents for pure air!

"Unventilated parlors, with gas-burners, (each consuming as much oxygen
as several men,) made as tight as possible, and a party of ladies and
gentlemen spending half the night in them! In 1861, I visited a
legislative hall, the legislature being in session. I remained half
an hour in the most impure air I ever breathed. Our school-houses are,
some of them, so vile in this respect, that I would prefer to have my
son remain in utter ignorance of books rather than to breathe, six
hours every day, such a poisonous atmosphere. Theatres and concert-rooms
are so foul that only reckless people continue to visit them. Twelve
hours in a railway-car exhausts one, not by the journeying, but because
of the devitalized air. While crossing the ocean in a Cunard steamer,
I was amazed that men who knew enough to construct such ships did not
know enough to furnish air to the passengers. The distress of
sea-sickness is greatly intensified by the sickening air of the ship.
Were carbonic acid _only black_, what a contrast there would be
between our hotels in their elaborate ornament!"

"Some time since I visited an establishment where one hundred and fifty
girls, in a single room, were engaged in needle-work. Pale-faced, and
with low vitality and feeble circulation, they were unconscious that
they were breathing air that at once produced in me dizziness and a
sense of suffocation. If I had remained a week with, them, I should,
by reduced vitality, have become unconscious of the vileness of the
air!"

There is a prevailing prejudice against _night air_ as unhealthful
to be admitted into sleeping-rooms, which is owing wholly to sheer
ignorance. In the night every body necessarily breathes night air and
no other. When admitted from without into a sleeping-room it is colder,
and therefore heavier, than the air within, so it sinks to the bottom
of the room and forces out an equal quantity of the impure air, warmed
and vitiated by passing through the lungs of inmates. Thus the question
is, Shall we shut up a chamber and breathe night air vitiated with
carbonic acid or night air that is pure? The only real difficulty about
night air is, that usually it is damper, and therefore colder and more
likely to chill. This is easily prevented by sufficient bed-clothing.

One other very prevalent mistake is found even in books written by
learned men. It is often thought that carbonic acid, being heavier
than common air, sinks to the floor of sleeping-rooms, so that the low
trundle-beds for children should not be used. This is all a mistake;
for, as a fact, in close sleeping-rooms the purest air is below and
the most impure above. It is true that carbonic acid is heavier than
common air, when pure; but this it rarely is except in chemical
experiments. It is the property of all gases, as well as of the two
(oxygen and nitrogen) composing the atmosphere, that when brought
together they always are entirely mixed, each being equally diffused
exactly as it would be if alone. Thus the carbonic acid from the skin
and lungs, being warmed in the body, rises as does the common air,
with which it mixes, toward the top of a room; so that usually there
is more carbonic acid at the top than at the bottom of a room.
[Footnote: Prof. Brewer, of the Tale Scientific School, says: "As a
fact, often demonstrated by analysis, there is generally more carbonic
acid near the ceiling than near the floor."] Both common air and
carbonic acid expand and become lighter in the same proportions; that
is, for every degree of added heat they expand at the rate of 1/480
of their bulk.

Here, let it be remembered, that in ill-ventilated rooms the carbonic
acid is not the only cause of disease. Experiments seem to prove that
other matter thrown out of the body, through the lungs and skin, is
as truly excrement and in a state of decay as that ejected from the
bowels, and as poisonous to the animal system. Carbonic acid has no
odor; but we are warned by the disagreeable effluvia of close
sleeping-rooms of the other poison thus thrown into the air from the
skin and lungs. There is one provision of nature that is little
understood, which saves the lives of thousands living in unventilated
houses; and that is, the passage of pure air inward and impure air
outward through the pores of bricks, wood, stone, and mortar. Were
such dwellings changed to tin, which is not thus porous, in less than
a week thousands and tens of thousands would be in danger of perishing
by suffocation.

These statements give some idea of the evils to be remedied. But the
most difficult point is _how_ to secure the remedy. For often the
attempt to secure pure air by one class of persons brings chills,
colds, and disease on another class, from mere ignorance or
mismanagement.

To illustrate this, it must be borne in mind that those who live in
warm, close, and unventilated rooms are much more liable to take cold
from exposure to draughts and cold air than those of vigorous vitality
accustomed to breathe pure air.

Thus the strong and healthy husband, feeling the want of pure air in
the night, and knowing its importance, keeps windows open and makes
such draughts that the wife, who lives all day in a close room and
thus is low in vitality, can not bear the change, has colds, and
sometimes perishes a victim to wrong modes of ventilation.

So, even in health-establishments, the patients will pass most of their
days and nights in badly-ventilated rooms. But at times the physician,
or some earnest patient, insists on a mode of ventilation that brings
more evil than good to the delicate inmates.

The grand art of ventilating houses is by some method that will empty
rooms of the vitiated air and bring in a supply of pure air _by small
and imperceptible currents_.

But this important duty of a Christian woman is one that demands more
science, care, and attention than almost any other; and yet, to prepare
her for this duty has never been any part of female education. Young
women are taught to draw mathematical diagrams and to solve astronomical
problems; but few, if any, of them are taught to solve the problem of
a house constructed to secure pure and moist air by day and night for
all its inmates.

The heating and management of the air we breathe is one of the most
complicated problems of domestic economy, as will be farther illustrated
in the succeeding chapter; and yet it is one of which, most American
women are profoundly ignorant.