"Wholesome air is equally essential with wholesome food; hence it is
that crowding individuals together in close, ill-ventilated apartments,
as is often the case in boarding-schools, manufactories, and
work-houses, is extremely prejudicial, both as a predisposing and
exciting cause of tubercular disease."
The great Baudeloque considers impure air the only real cause of
scrofula, other causes assisting. He thinks that no scrofula could be
developed without this cause, whatever others might be in operation.
An English writer who was physician to the Princess Victoria
says,--"There can be no doubt that the confined air of gloomy alleys,
manufactories, work-houses, and schools, and of our nurseries and very
sitting-rooms, is a powerful means of augmenting the hereditary
predisposition to scrofula, and of inducing such a disposition _de
novo_."
To drink from the same tumbler, to eat from the same plate, to wear the
same under-clothes, to wash in the same water, even with the cleanest of
friends, would offend most people. But these are as alabaster whiteness
and absolute purity, compared with the common practice of crowding into
unventilated rooms, and thus sucking into the innermost parts of our
vital organs the foulest secretions from each other's skins and lungs. I
wish it were possible for these vile exhalations to be imbued with some
dark color, if but temporarily. Then decency would join with reason in
demanding a pure atmosphere.