A General Survey

Air sanitation may be defined as the control of man's atmospheric environment, for the purpose of meeting the essential physiological requirements, and of avoiding abnormal and harmful conditions. Such a definition automatically places air sanitation within the field of Public Health Engineering, its unique feature being that the fundamental data are of the biological sciences, and its primary objective the preservation of health through environmental sanitation. The ventilating engineer has long shown his ability and expressed his willingness to modify air to meet any specific requirements, just as the structural engineer can readily design a sewage disposal plant to perform any required physical duty. In each case, however, the requirements must be established through biological investigation, and their ultimate expression may not be in common engineering terms. Nowhere is this unique feature of Public Health Engineering better illustrated than in the field of air sanitation, in which one is forced, at the very outset of any general discussion, to depart entirely from engineering as such, and to turn one's attention to the essentials of a sanitary air environment.