Pneumonia and Modern Architecture
PNEUMONIA is a disease of modern architecture—of the custom, steadily growing during the past fifteen or twenty years, of covering every available square foot of land with the building, and using every available square inch within its walls for little cubby-holes and cubicles in which human beings are to work and live and sleep. Air famine is the most potent cause of pneumonia, as it is of consumption. The high priest of modern hygiene, Edmund Parkes, more than a generation ago formulated a table demonstrating that three thousand cubic feet of air per hour is necessary for healthy life indoors, and during the latter third of the generation our architects have been steadily getting farther and farther away from this standard, and the pneumonia mortality incident thereto has been as steadily increasing.—Selected.