Health in Your Homes: The Importance of Ventilation, by J. Fletcher Horne, Kindle Edition

Description

This lecture on “sanitary science” by Dr. J. Fletcher Horne in the year 1885 has a great deal of smart thinking on the idea of keeping your home healthy — and most of it is extra-helpful because it is advice barely mentioned nowadays, despite representing basic tenets of health. For instance, his extensive emphasis on ventilation is literally refreshing. And his statement that the human body is “but a mass of hidden drains, large and small and, how directly the health of the individual is dependent on their condition!” rings true and is a concept worth thinking about in relation to our health.

Here’s how Dr. Horne sums up a healthy house:

“To have your house healthy it must present no facilities for holding dust or the poisonous particles of disease; if it retain the one it is likely to retain the other. It must possess every facility for the removal of its impurities as fast as they are produced; it must be free from damp; it must be filled with daylight from all points that can be charged with light from the sun without glare; it must be charged with perfectly pure air in steady changing current; it must be maintained at an even temperature, and must be free from draughts; it must have an efficient supply of pure and perfectly filtered water. A house possessing the advantages named under these heads cannot be far from a perfectly healthy house. It is a house in which disease will never be generated so long as it is kept up to its proper standard: it is a house in which disease, if it be introduced, will remain for the briefest possible period; it is a house which, after disease has left it, will admit of instant and complete purification.”

In Health in Your Homes, Dr. Horne discusses the importance of healthy cooking and eating and encourages women to stay home and cook, and to take cooking lessons — but says that “to attend well to the food and cookery of a household deserves the intelligent and careful application of whoever has the charge of it.” He believes in the healing power of good food and says that when “the doctor and cook together can do nothing with a case, it is, indeed, past hope of recovery.”