Artificial Airs

Abstract

Proper attention to Air and Cleanliness would tend more to preserve the health of mankind, than all the prescriptions of the faculty. The Universal Family Physician and Surgeon 1 By the last two decades of the eighteenth century, an attempt at air reform gripped the British scientific, medical, and political establishments. Medical analyses of smoky, damp, or rebreathed air shifted attention from air as a carrier to air as an immediate cause of disease. Physicians moved hazards from outdoors to indoors and, in addition to miasmas, began to discern the less spectacular if more tangible aerial poisoning in the everyday spaces of leisure, work, and sleep. 2 The atmospheric chemistry of indoor space inspired by the sociability of the elites and the gloom of the poor pronounced health a subject of mundane routine. Attention was therefore not always directed toward illnesses such as typhoid or smallpox, but on the "trifling disorders" such as headaches, fatigue, giddiness, and other discomforts linked to hygienic neglect or lifestyle excess. From the strictly medical point of view, casual indispositions and daily discomforts belonged to the analysis of the nonnaturals, such as drastic changes in air, diet, evacuation , rest, and exercise. By 1800, however, writing on the subject was also an analysis of a society engulfed in a maelstrom of unwellness. By this time, the analysis narrowed down from the general advice on the management of nonnaturals to the more specific interest in the meteorological life of the household. The signs of unwellness were increasingly more specific and increasingly indoor in quality. They included vertigo, dyspepsia, irritable bowels, bedroom cough, children's itch, rheumatism, nausea, diarrhea, and a loss of appetite. Combined, they threatened to cause a "transitory weakness of limbs," pallid skin, V. Janković, Confronting the Climate