The Press., 1893-03-16
AMONG BUSINESS
 MEN.

MdSSaCnuS0CCS moulCdI OOCleCy IaSC SuIu- mer, which embodied the results of an ex- haustive study of the vital statistics of disease in that state for the last twenty years-a period during which they have been recorded with an accuracy previous ly unheard of. He finds that siuce the board of health got to work in 1870 small pox, scarlet fever, measles, typhoid fever and consumption have diminished; but this pleasing discovery is accompanied by another which is discouraging to the san- itary reformers and sanguine physicians who have thought they were already wit messing the dawn of g. better day; for with this large diminution of the plainly preventible disease the death rate of the state remains stationary. Why?
 The answer is not so very far to seek. Many of the young and robust sons of the state have betaken themselves to the wider and more enticing fields of action in the west and south, leaving behind the older and feebler contingent who are more liable to the diseases found to be increas- ing-viz., bronchitis and pneumonia; but the great thing that ''levels down. is the increase in manufacturing with it's large influx of ignorant operatives, many of them French Canadians, who, in their ideas of personal cleanliness and of pre- ventive sanitation, are but degree above the brutes, and who still are dominated by notions worthy of the middle ages. They would resist vaccination as an un- l judgments of God-if they could-but find that they must submit or be shut out from the mills. During an epidemic of | diphtheria in Lawrence, Mass, a mother with others who were known to have a case of diphtheria ill their home. Her answer was: "It makes no difference :; if my children are sick, it is the will of | God"
 | But, when all allowances are made for these, there looms up one mighty and discouraging fact, in the great and truly alarming increase of fpneumonia-and that | most fatal time is the first year of life and then the great increase comes after forty, and the increase grows greater with each succeeding ten years.
 Is there any widely operating cause that can be justly reckoned contributory to this result? Without attempting to dogmatize in what may be called an un- explored field, it is pertinent to ask wheth- CT the great increase of steam heated of flee buildings in which the great majority of rooms have no adequate means for re- newal of the air to be warmed may not in a large measure account for it Many o1 to keep out air, whether cold or hot, and this very perfection contributes to their insalubrity. Up to the present time there seems to have been found no efficient means of that renewal, save chimney communicating with the outer air-an ex- pensive duct, but vitally important. That the air in rooms which lack this becomes oppressive" is witnessed by the various attempts to remedy the difficulty by pat ent, so-called, ventilators. Who hasn't seen the little whirling wheel inserted iI huge plate-glass window? A current is certainly created, else it wouldn't whirl
 but it is like asking fly to get up breeze
 with it's wings that will sail yacht, to expect that tiny local agitation, to renew the large cubic quantity of air that goes
 to the renewal of the blood of the large
 "crowd" of office people who work il some of these rooms, placed as near as possible to each other and still have ell
 bow room. .. I When the Waterlow-Allen improved
 dwellings in London were built, a set O thorough sanitary as well as financia statistics was initiated in connection witt them; and, after few years, it wal
 found that the death rate in these was a!
 low as in the best parts of rural England
 and that. too, when the controlling ele ment in the choice of site had been sim ply to bring the laborer near to his wo1k k
 How was this rate, much smaller thai LudG Ol buo IdSillOudDlo QudTC0IlS or G0
 town, to be accounted for? The one diff
 ferentiating circumstance was that ever,
 room had direct communication with
 chimney. Some, of the departments
 consisted of only two rooms and scul lery; but no matter, each living room ha it's grate stove; and when the fire ha done it's office in cooking, the Englishwo man-who reckons her coals as true
 black diamonds-lets down the wastin, 7 blower, and saves them by transformin, , the stove into an open grate, and there i permanent open grate in every sleeping room.
 In these dramatically sealed office room that abound in our business buildings the steam heats the atmosphere to a de , lightfully comfortable degree; the occu pant breathes and rebreathes the air il the zero days, when he cannot endure al opened window; and the effect is to si l lently undermine his power of resistance