p. 263 | Sleeping in Draughts

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Aug 28, 1879

Sleeping in Draughts.

MR. LEWIS W. LEEDS, the distinguished writer on ventilation, offers, in the Sanitarian, views which will be regarded as novel on the subject of sleeping in draughts. He believes in it, and says: "I have not the slightest doubt that if every individual in the city of New York were to sleep on the house-top instead of in their stifling rooms, the rate of mortality would be reduced twenty-five per cent in three months; and if they could have blankets enough to keep warm, and be merely screened from the rain at night, without obstructing the currents of air—or, in other words, to sleep directly in all the draughts they could get—the mortality would be reduced one-half in one year." He holds that it is warmth alone that determines the amount of fresh air one can afford at night.

"Where the body is kept warm, and pure air only inhaled, there is not one particle more danger of taking cold in sleeping directly between two open windows all the year round, than there is of taking cold in riding in an open sleigh when thoroughly warmed by wrappings of fur and robes, and such a thing as taking cold under such conditions never occurs, providing always the thorough warming of the feet and back, which are often neglected."