The actual construction of a ward creates an impediment to the perfect ventilation of all its apartments. There is a wide corridor, and along one side a series of small chambers, the windows of which are necessarily small, and sometimes high up; the windows, too, both in rooms and corridor, must be peculiarly constructed, and the openings in them for ventilation small. Although it is easy in this arrangement to get a free circulation of air along the corridor, it is not so to obtain it for each room opening out of it. By the scheme of construction we propose, these difficulties are mostly removed. The day-rooms on the ground-floor need no corridor alongside, and, as a single series or line of apartments, are permeated by a current of air traversing them from side to side. But if, for the convenience of the service of the house, some passage were thought necessary, it would be external to the rooms, and in designing the asylum it should be an object to prevent such corridors of communication interfering with the introduction of windows on the opposite sides of each sitting-room. On the bedroom-floor above, a corridor, where necessary, would not be a wide space for exercise, such as is required for a ward, but merely a passage, giving access from one part of the building to another. So, with respect to the windows, except those in the single bedrooms, it would be perfectly compatible with security to construct them much after the usual style adopted in ordinary houses, and thereby allow large openings for the free circulation of air.
Further, when the patients inhabit ordinarily-constructed sitting-rooms, the warming of these may be effected by the common open fires, which are dear to the sight and feelings of every Englishman, and impart a cheerful and home-like character. Likewise, there would be no need of keeping the whole building constantly heated at an enormous expense; for only one half of it would be occupied at a time, nor would those most costly and complicated systems of heating be at all required. The saving in large public asylums would be something very large in this one item,--that of fuel to burn, without counting the expenditure which is generally incurred for the heating apparatus, flues, furnaces, and shafts. As with the warming, so with the lighting of an institution constructed on our model,--only one-half would require illumination at the same time, and much gas-fitting would be saved by the diminution of the number of small apartments, repeated, after the prevailing model, in every ward, and requiring to be lighted.