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How Night Air Became Good Air, 1776-1930
Peter C. Baldwin
| TRAVELING THROUGH New Jersey in September 1776, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin stopped for the night at an inn so full that they were forced to share a cramped, single room with only one window. "The Window was open," Adams recalled in his autobiography, "and I, who was an invalid and afraid of the Air in the night (blowing upon me), shut it close. Oh! says Franklin dont shut the Window. We shall be suffocated. I answered I was afraid of the Evening Air. Dr. Franklin replied, the Air within this Chamber will soon be, and indeed is now worse than that without Doors: come! open the Window and come to bed, and I will convince you: I believe you are not acquainted with my Theory of Colds." Adams did as he was told, while his learned bed-mate "began an harrangue, upon Air and cold and Respiration and Perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep and left him and his Philosophy together."1 |
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Franklin's lecture washed over the slumbering Adams like a cool New Jersey breeze, but in the long run such opinions would prove harder to ignore. For the next century and a half, numerous scientists, doctors, architects and household advice writers would admonish Americans about their fear of night air. The common practice of closing the windows at night, they warned, was far less healthy than breathing fresh air from outdoors. Yet Americans proved to be at least as skeptical or inattentive as John Adams; until the twentieth century they still were being scolded for their superstitions. |
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Though the conflict between expert opinion and public behavior would end in a victory for the experts, this was no clear-cut triumph of science over superstition. Most of those who called for improved ventilation in the nineteenth century based their arguments on medical theories that later would be discredited, while those who feared the night air eventually were validated by medical research: A stuffy room may have been unpleasant to sleep in, but an open window invited in mosquitoes that would be found to carry disease. Furthermore, the dispute over night air reflected considerations beyond those of medical science. The growing call for ventilation in the nineteenth century was inspired in part by changes in household technology, not least of which was the heating stove pioneered by Franklin himself. Also contributing to the discussion were changes in the middle-class conception of the home, heightened fears about the foulness of the body, and new ideas about the human relationship with nature. By the early twentieth century, a man of Adams's status would have insisted on sleeping with the window open, but for reasons less narrowly medical than those put forth by Franklin on that night in 1776. |
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The story of how night air became good air illustrates the intimate interconnections that once existed between perceptions of bodily health and perceptions of the natural world, and thus can be read as a contribution to building the "environmental history of the body" proposed by Christopher Sellers.2 The place of the body in nature was particularly open to debate in the nineteenth century, an era of radical change in the physical landscape, domestic technology, and medical knowledge. Until a new consensus emerged, the simple question of whether to open the window became laden with a tangle of unstable meanings. |
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