Hints to househunters and householders / by Ernest Turner.

  • Turner, Ernest.
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hints to househunters and householders / by Ernest Turner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    aggravation of the one or by the chronic worry oi the other. And these ancient and prescriptive griefs, to which in the course of many generations the house- victim had become—as eels to skinning—more or less accustomed, have of late years received a new and far more terrible extension. To those natural enemies of his race—the landlord, or the tenant; the architect and the surveyor ; the carpenter and bricklayer, and mason, and plumber, and British working-man in general—has now been added a yet more terrible and remorseless tormentor in the shape of the Sanitary Engineer. Always hard to get and bitter to keep, the ordinary house “of com- merce ” has now been plainly shown to be impossible to live in. Impossible, clearly, to live without ven- tilation ; and the ordinary house is never ventilated. Impossible still to exist under the devitalising influences of damp or chill; and the ordinary house is an ingenious combination of the draught-trap and the sponge. Impossible/ of all even to con- template existence under any condition of defective drainage or vitiated air ; and what skill has been displayed in the construction of the ordinary house has been, as it would seem, exclusively exerted to keep the drainage from flowing out, and to let the sewer-air in. And the matter was not improved by the fact that while the house-doctors, like other doctors, were all agreed as to the fatal character of the disease, they differed with remarkable unanimity as