Thread by @sarahzhang

I wrote about something I've thinking about a lot recently:

19th century doctors were themselves obsessed with ventilation. How did we manage to forget that? 1/

theatlantic.com/health/archive…

Florence Nightingale was the original ventilation influencer. As a nurse in the Crimean War, she saw 10x soldiers die of disease than wounds.

She was also a pioneering statistician. This is her famous infographic illustrating deaths during the war

2/

Nightingale popularizing pavilion-plan hospitals, which had big windows that created cross breezes between the beds. She even calculated how many cubic feet of air each patient needed.

3/

📷: Getty

By the way, the windows stayed open even in the dead of winter because air!

One historian told me stories of patients closing windows, nursing opening them, and then finally doctors knocking the glass out so the windows stayed open. 4/

Ventilation changed the very architecture of 19th century buildings.

In the Palace of Westminster, the Victoria Tower and Big Ben were actually ventilation towers too. A quarter of the building's physical space is its old ventilation system, now sitting unused. 5/

Lastly, this essay was a little paean to my apartment because I am moving this week. (😬) Don't worry, the new apartment is also old and it will also have radiators—and more importantly, windows that open!

(Why do new apartment buildings all have windows that barely open?)

/end

Here's the story: theatlantic.com/health/archive…

Also #ff @CarolineWazer who found this gem of a report by a ventilation expert utterly appalled by the state of air in DC

https://twitter.com/carolinewazer/status/1293550727118434307