★ Keep up to date with the latest news - subscribe to the Transcribe Bentham newsletter; Find a new page to transcribe in our list of Untranscribed Manuscripts
36
disease and the influence of the remedy. Complaints from the sick might
be received, the instant the cause of complaint, real or imaginary, occurred:
though as misconduct would be followed by instant reprehension, such
complaints must be proportionably few.
The separation of the cells might be in part continued, either
for comfort or for decency. Curtains, instead of grating, would give the patient,
when he thought fit, the option of being seen. Partitions of greater solidity
and extent might divide the fabric into different wards: confining infection,
adapting themselves to the varieties of disease, and affording, upon
occasion, diversities of temperature.
In hot weather, to save the room from being heated, and
the patients from being incommoded, by the Sun, shades or awnings
might secure the windows towards the South.
I do not mean to entertain you here with a system of physick, or
a treatise upon airs. But a word or two on this subject you must permitt
me. Would the cielings of the cell be high enough? Is this plan of construction
sufficiently favourable to ventilation? I have not the good fortune
to have read a book, published not long ago published on the subject of hospitals,
by our own countryman Mr:+ But I cannot help begging of you to
+ though I remember
seeing some
account of it in a
Review.
recommend to the notice your medical friends the perusal of Dr De Maret's paper in the Memoirs
of the Academy of Dijon for the year 1782. If either his facts or his reasoning
are to be trusted, not only no loftiness of ceiling is sufficient to ensure to
such a building a purity of air, but it may appear questionable
whether such effect be upon the whole promoted by that circumstance.(a)
This great anxiety seems to be, that, at some knows period
or periods of the day, the whole mass of air may undergo at once a total
change: not trusting to partial and precarious evacuations by opening
here and there a window: still less to any heighth or other amplitude of
of room: a circumstance which of itself tends rather to render them still more partial
and precarious. Proscribing all rectilinear straight walls and flat ceilings forming
angles at the junctions, he recommends accordingly, for the inside of his
building, the form of a long oval, curved in every part direction except that of the floor,
placing a door at each end. By throwing open these doors, he seems to
make it pretty apparent, that the smallest draught will be sufficient to
effect an entire change in the whole stock of air: as, at which ever end a
quantity of air happens first to enter, it will carry all before it, till it gets to the
other. Opening windows or other apertures, disposed in any other part of the
room, would tend rather to disturb and counteract the current, than to
promote it.
From the same reasoning it will follow that the circular form demanded
(a)To a Hospital lately built at Lyons a vast dome had been given in this
view. It had been expected that the foul air should be found at the top: while
that near the floor should have been sweet and wholsome. On the contrary,
substances, which turned putrid at the bottom in a single day, remained
sweet above five days at the end of five days. ibid. page 31.
|
Identifier: | JB/550/226/002 "JB/" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 550.
|
|||
|---|---|---|---|
|
550 |
|||
|
226 |
|||
|
002 |
|||