Health, or, How to Live

DEATH ON THE RAILROAD

NOTWITHSTANDING the great number of deaths from the casualties of railroad traveling — collisions, capsizings, running off the track, running under drawbridges, etc., — we believe many more deaths result from being confined in the cars than from being tumbled out of them. In cold it seems to be a choice of evils — death by wounds and bruises without, or death from infection within. HHTL 241.3

Not long since, in a trip to and from Philadelphia, we examined three or four crowded cars, without finding a breath of fresh air. Every window was closed; and the red-hot stove, the effluvia from human bodies — not always of the cleanest — the smell of liquor, the scent of tobacco, and the smoke of two oil-lamps, commingling in one deep, thick, dank, suffocating stench, reminded one more of the valley of Gehenna than of accommodations for travelers. HHTL 241.4

We watched our opportunity, and the first vacancy on the window side of a seat came into our possession, and, presto, up went one window — a very little, however, so as not to excite alarm and provoke a controversy. Soon a large, portly, red-faced, gouty-looking individual took the other end of our pew. He was well bundled in coats and overcoats, his neck and face wrapped up in fur to his eyes; and of course he was very sensitive to the weather, and moreover, troubled with a “hacking cough.” He was hardly fairly squared in his seat before he espied the raised window, or felt the “chilling blast” along the projecting peak of his florid proboscis. “Please to close the window — that window, sir; have the goodness to shut the window,” were the hurried salutations he uttered half entreatingly, and rather more than half-commandingly. “Can’t do it, sir; can’t live so; do not like to breathe this air that has been breathed so many times already,” was our hasty defense. We did, however, lest worse might come to worst, drop the window to within half an inch of the bottom, and so, by applying our inhaling apparatus close to the crevice, managed to maintain a communication with the surrounding atmosphere for the remaining fifty miles. But our friend did not have to sustain his dangerous proximity to fresh air long; for at the next depot a seat was vacated, which he readily seized, and where he seemed to have found a people of “one smell and one mind” on the subject of ventilation. HHTL 242.1

Such has ever been our experience on the railroads. Not one person in a hundred appears to know or care any thing about this subject. The editor of the Tribune, having recently enjoyed a trip to the West a la railroad, gives vent to his sensations on the subject in the following strain. We commend his remarks as well as our own to the attention of the conductors everywhere: HHTL 242.2

I went West over the Erie, and returned over the Pennsylvania Central — both excellent roads — the Erie I think the best managed and run of any long road in the country. In regularity, punctuality, and freedom from accident, it can hardly be exceeded. The Pennsylvania is not run so fast, especially toward this end, but is run regularly, safely, and is doing a large business. But the horrible recklessness of human health and life evinced in the want of ventilation on these as on most other roads, deserves the severest reprehension. Why do not Grand Juries take action on this wholesale slaughter? Every night sees hundreds of trains running this way and that, with thirty to fifty passengers in each car, so shut in that there is not so much pure air entering any one as three men need to breathe. Thus, in five minutes after the door has been closed, the whole atmosphere of the car is putrid, and every inmate is thence inhaling rank poison until the doors are opened again. Enter one of these cars as the train stops at a station, and the effluvia is enough to knock down a horse, though those who have deprived their preceptions by gradual acclimation to it may not mind it. The emigrant or second-class cars, being more densely crowded and less frequently opened, are especially noxious, and are doubtless causing thousands of typhus fevers and kindred diseases, of which the source is unsuspected by the sufferers. Messrs. Presidents, Directors and Superintendents! do you know that you are poisoning your customers by wholesale? If you don’t, ask any tolerably educated physician to ride one night in your cars, and tell you what he thinks of their atmosphere. If you do know the fact, why do you persist in murdering people by the thousand? Don’t talk about patent ventilators, but bore five hundred augerholes in the floor and roof of each passenger car at once, and see that these are kept open until you can determine what to do next. Do something, and do it at once. — Water-Cure Journal. HHTL 243.1