Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 300, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 December 1910 — Open-Air Treatment. [ARTICLE]

Open-Air Treatment.

Time was when doctors used to bleed weak and emaciated patients, and thus make them weaker and more emaciated. In those same “good old days” consumptives were kept in close, unventilated rooms and slowly put to death by misdirected kindness. And in that same era schoolchildren who lacked muscle and strength and were less vigorous and healthy than their fellows were coddled at home, and in school were kept near the hot stoves and away from every draft of fresh air. They breathed the vitiated atmosphere of the ordinary schoolroom which had been breathed over and again by all the other scholars in the same room. Every avenue to good health was closed against them, and most of them died. What a change has taken place in the past few years. Doctors rarely, if ever, bleed patients now. Consumptives are turned out of doors, away from heaters and stoves and registers, and puny school children are now taught in tents, In warm weather and in cold, with no fires to burn the oxygen out of the air and no other walls than those of thin canvas to protect them from drafts.