The care of the sick at home and in the hospital : a handbook for families and for nurses / by Th. Billroth ; tr. by special authority of the author by J. Bentall Endean.

  • Billroth, Theodor, 1829-1894.
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The care of the sick at home and in the hospital : a handbook for families and for nurses / by Th. Billroth ; tr. by special authority of the author by J. Bentall Endean. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    being exhaled,—it is clear that a man, limited to a certain quantity of air in a perfectly air-tight room, would perish, because the pure air of the room is gradually used up by him, and he poisons himself by re-inhaling air previously expelled from his lungs. This manner of death, resulting from dis- turbance of the respiratory action, is termed suffocation. A man in a hermetically-closed room would suffocate slowly before he would die from starvation. Fortunately perfect air-exclusion is very difficult to secure, for the air penetrates yet more easily than water all the finest pores (to our eyes invisible) of building materials : not only through all joints and cracks, but through all building stones, through mortar, plaster, marble, &c. But the quantity that penetrates into a room in this way is not sufficient to produce adequate change of air to sustain life. If there were not doors and windows which are some- times opened, persons in a perfectly closed room built of ordinary materials and without windows and doors, in spite of this natural ventilation, would perish by degrees. When, as children, we turned our toy-boxes into homes for caterpillars, we were made to pierce many holes in the sides of the boxes, to prevent the caterpillars from dying. Man needs much more air to live than caterpillars and grubs do, that often bore holes in wood to great depths where very little air can penetrate. Airing a room, essentially signifies the constant renewal of air. Such renewal, where possible, should be steady and continuous. In the room itself the air ought to be, and should remain, as pure as it is outside the house, where the various atmospheric gases which surround the earth con- tinually mix. If, then, in a closed living-room built of the usual materials the same condition of things is always main- tained—the same number of persons, the same air-openings,