IN SHOP AND OFFICE.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 261, 3 November 1928, Page 7 (Supplement)

IN SHOP AND OFFICE.

ENTOMBMENT IN CONCRETE.

HEALTH OF WORKERS.

{By PERITUS.)

In the climate of England it is possible for men and women to spend eight or ten hours daily in a small closed office, and if normally healthy to remain so for life. My own solicitor, who was free from illness until over seventy, used a very small, dark office, in a city street so narrow that light was obtained for the room by reflecting mirrors mounted outside the one window. He took his luncheon in an underground restaurant, favoured a meat diet and light wines, and did a great amount of work in a large practice inherited from his father. In the climate of New Zealand—a naturally agricultural country —such conduct is suicidal. In the North, damp, cold and humid heat make indoor life dangerous to health, and special adjustment of conditions is necessary if office life is to be safe and reasonably comfortable. A recent lecture by an expert in Dunedin has said that, with us, "modern conditions demand a change in mode of living." When recruiting inspections during the war proved so many men unfit for active service, it was the town dwellers who lowered the average of the fit and provided the bulk of CI to C 3 examinees. The expert said this was due to "the disharmony between the nature of man's body and the highly complex and artificial environment it found itself in to-day." Amongst our children, whose surroundings in school have received much attention, there is evidence of the dangerous effects of confinement. Of fifty children examined in a kindergarten school many yet under the age of five had had tonsils removed, only one in four had sound teeth, all had some symptoms of knock-knee (rickets), and these were commencing a lengthy period lof indoor life. More than half of 150 children in Standards I. to 111. "presented degrees of deformity falling into two of the worst classes, and this increased to three-quarters of the whole in Standards IV. to VI." Foot deformaties were particularly noticeable. It must be remembered that the white race is yet new in this country, and robust strains do well, whilst those whose family history is less satisfactory must go through many generations' before the descendants accommodate themselves to sub-equatorial conditions. There is something of the cave dweller about the man in a concrete-walled room—it is sometimes a concrete cube— for he loses the comfort and friendliness of wood, which in floor, wall and ceiling i has a different electrical resistance. Far . less pleasant than brick, concrete walls will "sweat/ crack and discolour, as no wood or brick will do, and there is often, in chill weather, a tomblike atmosphere about the concrete office. Rheumatism is the enemy of most of us, and the humid air and soil of Auckland keep us in a bath of invisible vapour which encourages the progress of the disease, and where this atmosphere is confined and not constantly moving it is almost at times mephitic. A new stone building is said to take a year to dry, a concrete building twice as long, both even longer if there are a succession of wet seasons. The appearance of men who have voyaged in iron ships as compared with those who have sailed in wood, is not in favour of the former, whatever the reason of this may be. I doubt if our old surviving pioneers would have lived so long, or been so tough and hardy, had they spent all their years in factory, shop or office. In old guide books to Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand the healthiness of the last named is ascribed to the "almost constant breezes, which blow day and night." What would the writers say if they saw u» putting up nine-storey buildings to overshadow our streets and check the free passage of the winds?