Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 August 1876 — What is in the Bedroom? [ARTICLE]

What is in the Bedroom?

If two persons are to occupy a bedroom during the night, let them step on a weighing-scale as they retire, and then again in the morning, and they will find that their actual weight is, at least, a pound less in tbe morning. Frequently there will be a loss of two or more pounds, and the average loss throughout the year will be a pound of matter, which has gone off from their bodies, partly from the lungs, and partly through the pores of the skin. The escaped matter is carbonic acid and decayed animal matter or poisonous exhalation. This is diffused through the air in part, and part absorbed by the bed-clothes. If a single ounce of cotton y ppl be burned in a room it will so saturate the air with smoke that one can hardly breathe, though there can hardly be 1 ox. of foreign matter in the air, jf an ounce of cotton be burned every half hour during the night, tbe air will be kept continually saturated with smokp, unions there be an open window or door for it to escape. Now the 18 oz. of smoke thus formed is far less poisonous than the 16 of exhalations form the lungs and bodies of two persons who have lost a pound in weight during the eight hours of sleeping; for, while the dry smoke if mamly taken info the luugs, the

damp odors from the body are absorbed both into the lungs and into the pores of the whole body. Need more be said to show the importance of having bedrooms well ventilated, and of thoroughly airing the sheets, coverlids ana mattresses in the morning * before peeking them up in the form of a neatlymade bed?—Science of Health.