OUR GRANDFATHERS DIED TOO YOUNG. 171 



whole article would be insufficient to show how knowledge on this 

 subject, not understood in its rudiments fifty years ago, has ad- 

 vanced. Typhus, or ship fever, a disease most easily and directly 

 communicable from person to person, is now known, when it 

 arises spontaneously, to be the fruit of rebreathed air. It formed 

 the " plagues " of the earlier centuries ; there are still spots in 

 London infected houses from which typhus is never absent, 

 and in 1839 five per cent of the tailors of London died of it ; it 

 is to get rid of it, in large measure, that the wholesale demolition 

 of London " rookeries " is at this moment going on. When men 

 ceased to weave in their own unventilated hovels, and were gath- 

 ered together in high, airy, light factory rooms, it was very soon 

 seen that the number of consumptives, hunchbacks, and bow- 

 legged diminished an unanswerable testimony to the value of 

 light and air in saving and prolonging lives. When it was shown 

 that the annual death-rate from preventable typhus, which at- 

 tacked persons in the vigor of life, was double that of the allied 

 armies at Waterloo, England began to suspect that there was a 

 commercial value to a man's life, and enacted laws for its protec- 

 tion ; indeed, public sentiment on this matter has become so edu- 

 cated that no employer would dare to crowd eighty workmen into 

 a space where the " cubic feet of air " to each was less than one 

 hundred feet less than one tenth of that required for healthful 

 breathing. The reduction of the deaths of children in a single 

 hospital, by having it well ventilated, from 2,944 out of a total of 

 7,050 down to 279, convinced the most stolid conservative that 

 " there was something in it." It seems to an intelligent person of 

 to-day as if everybody, everywhere, and all the time had under- 

 stood the importance of pure air ; but when it is remembered that 

 the constitution of the atmosphere has been known only a little 

 more than a hundred years, and the vital relations of oxygen to 

 the human blood for a much shorter period, it will be seen that 

 the idea is wide of the fact. 



Systematic sanitation began in England about fifty years ago ; 

 in America about twenty the first State Board of Health made 

 its first report in 1870 ; but thoroughly informed persons declare 

 that among our more plastic populations, where ideas do not en- 

 counter so many vested abuses and prejudices, they have made 

 such rapid headway that we are already abreast of the most ad- 

 vanced sanitary thought of Europe ; some of the new Western 

 towns have sprung, like Minerva, in full completeness, from their 

 creators, with entire equipment of pure water-supply, perfect 

 drainage, electric lights, and houses built on the most healthful 

 models. 



The site of the dwelling has become an object of prime im- 

 portance, and public opinion has forbidden the use of swamps 



