In 1903, the Select Committee on Ventilation, appointed by Britain's House of Commons, published a critical review of ‘modern’ ventilation systems. It decried the infamous lack of success engineers had had in ventilating the Houses of Parliament, but, more critically, it noted new statistical information showing that ‘impurity of the air is the most important cause of death’. The document made waves in Britain before traveling across the sea to the United States, where it proved a vital weapon in the armamentarium of artificial ventilation's detractors.
Medical practitioners were quite often among those who eschewed and excoriated artificial ventilation as unhealthy, unsafe, unnecessary and impractical. This was the cause of great consternation among mechanical engineers especially, who despaired that leaving artificial ventilation systems out of hospital construction, or allowing them to lay dormant, was ‘retrogressive’. In cities whose inhabitants increasingly relied on, and breathed, artificial air, medical buildings which continued to rely on windows to provide air were worse than anachronistic. They were dangerously anti-modern.
But medical practitioners had their reasons. This paper recounts the context and content of their resistance to artificial ventilation in the first decades of the 20th century. It highlights related contemporary debates in the construction of subways, ‘skyscrapers’ and other essentials of urban life. And it examines the impact of contemporary theories concerning ‘fresh air,’ which, drawing on air’s earlier status as primarily a therapeutic agent, made manifest the essential difficulties of deciding what ‘fresh air’ actually was in the first place.
