Fresh air has long been seen as important for our health, even if we haven't always understood why
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Wednesday, July 5, 2023
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And we have good reasons for looking at indoor air quality.
Key Points:
- And we have good reasons for looking at indoor air quality.
- From wildfire smoke, to industrial pollution, many of us have felt the impacts of poor air quality and turned to air filters and respirators to cope.
- The White House held a summit last year on improving indoor air quality to reduce the transmission of COVID-19.
Ventilation and eighteenth-century medicine
- In the 1700s, British physicians took advantage of new scientific approaches but had little technology to see what was going on.
- They believed that most contagious illnesses spread through smelly decaying matter, or miasma, from rotting food, sick bodies and so on.
- Eighteenth-century physicians saw diseases spreading easily in crowded, poorly ventilated structures, from ships and jails to the homes of the poor.
- Ventilation made sense as a way to make people safer: blow out the bad air.
Outbreaks in the Navy
- In his 1797 book on naval medicine, physician and poet Thomas Trotter drew on his extensive experience at sea.
- He questioned both miasma and germ theory.
- Trotter explains how they ended an outbreak of a “malignant fever” on a navy ship in 1791.
Ventilation spreads
- Like eighteenth-century doctors, nineteenth-century writers promoted ventilation and fresh air.
- In fiction, Jane Austen had her characters “breathing fresh air,” while Lady Morgan complained about “thickly populated and ill ventilated” streets helping to spread disease.
- Abrams remarked, “That the poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, [and] Byron should be so thoroughly ventilated is itself noteworthy.”
Ventilation comes back
- But advances in germ theory couldn’t erase the benefits of breathing fresh air from the public consciousness.
- Around 1850, journalist Henry Mayhew interviewed one Londoner who said the following about the city’s cheap housing:
“Nothing can be worse to the health than these places, without ventilation, cleanliness, or decency, and with forty people’s breaths perhaps mingling together in one foul choking steam of stench.”
“Nothing can be worse to the health than these places, without ventilation, cleanliness, or decency, and with forty people’s breaths perhaps mingling together in one foul choking steam of stench.” In 1859, Florence Nightingale helped revive ventilation in healthcare. - Now, another pandemic has got us talking about the importance of fresh air.