...; or, Ventilation with warm air by self-acting suction power; with review of the mode of calculating the draught in hot-air flues; and with some actual experiments. Cloth 8vo, 129pp + 5 plates at rear. 2 large folding tables, several charts and diagrams throughout. Beveled boards with gilt-stamped titles. Very Good with minor surface soil, dent to the center bottom edge of the rear board. Small tear at the bottom corner of the front flyleaf. Binding tight, contents clean.

The result of a practical experiment by two homeopathic physicians: In 1861, John James Drysdale constructed a suburban house in Liverpool using his own system of ventilation; his colleague John Williams Hayward adapted the design to an urban site in 1867. They recorded the environmental conditions of each house and the health of the occupants. Their general findings are presented here alongside some of the experiment's raw data, tangentially poetic condition reports, and wonderful plans of the houses and ventilation designs.

In a late Victorian society struggling with issues of sanitation and disease, architects were implored to design with attention to health and not cost. However, given the public's inevitable objection to increased building costs, Drysdale and Hayward acknowledged the limit of architects' ability to implement the changes, and believed it was the responsibility of medical professionals and institutions to educate the public into instigating the changes themselves.

"Many Victorian doctors lectured on the design of healthy houses. The physicians' apparent expertise in assessing the delicate relationship of health to the environment, in the guise of a more "scientific approach" to architecture, appealed to a middle-class population that was desperate for new solutions to seemingly insoluble health problems. (p.64) See: Annmarie Adams, Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900 (2001) OCLC lists 16 copies, 9 in the US; no original copies of any edition currently available on the market.