DEATH ON THE RAILROAD
NOTWITHSTANDING the great number of deaths from the casualties of railroad traveling - collisions, capsizings, running off the track, running under drawbridges, etc., - we believe many more deaths result from being confined in the cars than from being tumbled out of them. In cold it seems to be a choice of evils - death by wounds and bruises without, or death from infection within.
Not long since, in a trip to and from Philadelphia, we examined three or four crowded cars, without finding a breath of fresh air. Every window was closed; and the red-hot stove, the effluvia from human bodies - not always of the cleanest - the smell of liquor, the scent of tobacco, and the smoke of two oil-lamps, commingling in one deep, thick, dank, suffocating stench, reminded one more of the valley of Gehenna than of accommodations for travelers.
We watched our opportunity, and the first vacancy on the window side of a seat came into our possession, and, presto, up went one window - a very little, however, so as not to excite alarm and provoke a controversy. Soon a large, portly, red-faced, gouty-looking individual took the other end of our pew. He was well bundled in coats and overcoats, his neck and face wrapped up in fur to his eyes; and of course he was very sensitive to the weather, and moreover, troubled with a "hacking cough." He was hardly fairly squared in his seat before he espied the raised window, or felt the "chilling blast" along the projecting peak of his florid proboscis. "Please to close the window - that window, sir; have the goodness to shut the window," were the hurried salutations he uttered half entreatingly, and rather more than half-commandingly. "Can't do it, sir; can't live so; do not like to breathe this air that has been breathed so many times already," was our hasty defense. We did, however, lest worse might come to worst, drop the window to within half an inch of the bottom, and so, by applying our inhaling apparatus close to the crevice, managed to maintain a communication with the surrounding atmosphere for the remaining fifty miles. But our friend did not have to sustain his dangerous proximity to fresh air long; for at the next depot a seat was vacated, which he readily seized, and where he seemed to have found a people of "one smell and one mind" on the subject of ventilation.
Such has ever been our experience on the railroads. Not one person in a hundred appears to know or care any thing about this subject. The editor of the Tribune, having recently enjoyed a trip to the West a la railroad, gives vent to his sensations on the subject in the following strain. We commend his remarks as well as our own to the attention of the conductors everywhere:
I went West over the Erie, and returned over the Pennsylvania Central - both excellent roads - the Erie I think the best managed and run of any long road in the country. In regularity, punctuality, and freedom from accident, it can hardly be exceeded. The Pennsylvania is not run so fast, especially toward this end, but is run regularly, safely, and is doing a large business. But the horrible recklessness of human health and life evinced in the want of ventilation on these as on most other roads, deserves the severest reprehension. Why do not Grand Juries take action on this wholesale slaughter? Every night sees hundreds of trains running this way and that, with thirty to fifty passengers in each car, so shut in that there is not so much pure air entering any one as three men need to breathe. Thus, in five minutes after the door has been closed, the whole atmosphere of the car is putrid, and every inmate is thence inhaling rank poison until the doors are opened again. Enter one of these cars as the train stops at a station, and the effluvia is enough to knock down a horse, though those who have deprived their preceptions by gradual acclimation to it may not mind it. The emigrant or second-class cars, being more densely crowded and less frequently opened, are especially noxious, and are doubtless causing thousands of typhus fevers and kindred diseases, of which the source is unsuspected by the sufferers. Messrs. Presidents, Directors and Superintendents! do you know that you are poisoning your customers by wholesale? If you don't, ask any tolerably educated physician to ride one night in your cars, and tell you what he thinks of their atmosphere. If you do know the fact, why do you persist in murdering people by the thousand? Don't talk about patent ventilators, but bore five hundred augerholes in the floor and roof of each passenger car at once, and see that these are kept open until you can determine what to do next. Do something, and do it at once.
Water-Cure Journal.
VENTILATION
The evils resulting from breathing, night after night, an atmosphere becoming more and more vitiated as the morning approaches, probably equal, if they do not exceed, those resulting from the intemperate use of spirituous liquors. Indeed it is questionable whether a craving for stimulants has not been occasionally created by this abominable yet prevalent custom of keeping the windows of the sleeping apartment either entirely closed or opened but a "crack." They should be widely opened every night throughout the year, unless the weather is intensely cold, or the wind unusually violent, or some other valid reason exists for mitigating the draught.
Were this practice universally adopted, a surprising reduction would be quickly manifested in the frequency of morning headache and nausea, dyspepsia, chronic catarrh, croup, diphtheria, influenza, measles, scrofula, consumption, scarlet fever, small-pox, typhus fever, felon whitlow, erysipelas, and many other disorders, which are more often induced by an infected atmosphere than any other cause.
In recommending a draught I am not advocating a whirlwind or hurricane, but merely such a current of air as will supply the lungs during each night with from eight to ten thousand installments of pure, fresh, free oxygen, in a quantity fully equal to any possible demand of the human system. Stagnant air cannot supply the want, neither can air that is in motion, if it be not perceptibly so; nothing less than a draught, moderate but decided, and continuing throughout the night, can meet in every respect the requirements of health.
Of the many and remarkable advantages of sleeping in the open air, or what may be regarded as the same thing, I can speak from thirteen years' experience. Commencing the practice rather abruptly in the winter of 1850, and without suffering any serious inconvenience from the initial trial, I became in a few weeks nearly as invulnerable to the assaults of a freezing cold blast as a salamander to fire. From that time to the present I have not once suffered from any pulmonary affection, and, except in very rare instances,
have been utterly exempt from any illness that could be traced to a night-draught exposure. In short, a practice which . . . I have rigidly observed for a series of years, as one of the most important of all the means that I have hitherto adopted for indefinitely promoting health, strength, and development.
The following are a few examples to illustrate the importance of a thorough system of ventilation, in cases where little if any complaint had been made of inattention to this hygienic measure:
There was once in Glasgow an assemblage of buildings attached to a factory, which were occupied by about five hundred persons - one family in each room. For a long period an immense deal of sickness had pervaded the buildings, which the inmates seemed to regard as a mysterious dispensation of Providence, for they absolutely refused to adopt such sanitary expedients as had been repeatedly advised them. At length the proprietors of the establishment, despairing of ever making the inmates appreciate the importance of occasionally opening windows, resolved to apply a system of ventilation which should be thorough, continual, and utterly beyond the control of those subjected to it. They accordingly connected each room, by means of tubes, with the chimney of the factory furnace, and compelled every occupant, whether willing or unwilling, to expose daily and nightly to a draught of air. The result was that sickness of every kind rapidly diminished, and one disease, typhus fever, which had frequently raged as an epidemic, became for eight years "scarcely known to the place."
In 1842, at Norwood School, in England, scrofula made its appearance among six hundred children, and destroyed a great number of them. The disorder having been attributed to an insufficiency and bad quality of food, a scientific investigation was made, and a decision given that the food was most abundant and good - that "defective ventilation and consequent atmospheric impurity" was the cause of the sickness. A thorough system of ventilation was immediately applied, and scrofula rapidly disappeared, nor did it ever recur, though the number of pupils was gradually increased to eleven hundred.
In a hospital in Dublin, 2,944 deaths took place in four years. A better system of ventilation having been resorted to as a means of lessening the mortality, it was found that during the next four years the number of deaths was only 279.
The above facts are merely selected from a long array of a similar character, which tend to show the paramount importance of breathing an uncorrupted atmosphere. It is certainly no exaggeration to say, that were the public as particular as they should be, and easily might be, about the quality of that subtle fluid which enters and departs from an average pair of human lungs about a thousand times an hour, and nearly nine million times in a year, the bills of human mortality would be reduced one-third at least, and the average duration of human life be nearer seventy than forty.
- Sel.
1865 JW, HHTL 241-246