The idea that good Air was not only a fundamental element to ensure health but also to avoid the deterioration of mental faculties is an inheritance Reid received from the eighteenth century, when disease and lack of reason were connected together as twin parts of the same “evil” that threaten the social body. If breathing air and political power can be linked together, their bounds are certainly not limited to the walls of the House of Commons, but in fact go back to the walls that surrounded the “Houses of Confinement”, those places where, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, all the undesirable products of civilization – people who didn’t work, vagabonds, criminals, young thieves and the insane – were kept locked and controlled to avoid the danger of contaminating society. In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault describes the role of those buildings inside the cities. Hospitals, prisons, jails, and other similar equipments, which in England were known as the “houses of correction”, regardless minor differences, were all used for the same political purposes in the seventeenth century: policing social disorders and protecting government against collective agitations by absorbing unemployment, idleness, mendicancy and poverty. Madness appeared as the horizon of delinquency and the incapacity for work, and soon was incorporated as another social problem that was threatening the space of the city and therefore should be housed together with all other sorts of misbehaviours. Given their usually poor sanitary conditions, fevers and similar diseases that were common at this time would easily turn into epidemics inside those buildings. Because they were considered to hold all the social dangers that threaten the cohesion of society, the frequent occurrence of disease rapidly became attached to moral connotations. The “evil” housed indoors being thought as what impregnate the flash and at the same time contaminate the soul. Air was considered as the medium of contagion by which the rotten vapours and impurities rising from the houses could be transmitted to the atmosphere of the entire city, threatening the health of its inhabitants and the moral vigour of society. The reform movement that followed in the second half of the eighteenth-century in hospitals was largely based on the effort to ensure cleanliness, both social and biological. Architecture was called to define precise divisions, providing that undesirable communication between the interns were closely observed and regulated, but at the same its mechanisms should be designed to enable good rates of ventilation to reduce the risk of contamination and thus “preventing evil and disease from tainting the air and spreading their contagion in the atmosphere of the cities”[1].

Later in the nineteenth century those fears can still be noticed in introduction of the Theory and Practice of Ventilation - “no other cause, at least in modern times, appears to have inflected so great amount of evil upon human race as defective ventilation” -, but now they come as just a glimpse of a discourse that had already been fully incorporated by the technical language of design, and which by design was applied in other spatial configurations besides hospitals and prisons. The great sanitary reforms of Victorian London disseminated ventilation mechanisms throughout the houses of the cities, supplying fresh air no just to lunatics and delinquents, but to the whole urban working-military living force. The poorly infrastructure-equipped working-class neighbourhoods of nineteenth-century industrial London where more then the sources of social misbehaviour; they were the motor of modernization and the protagonist of a possible historic disorder. Frequent disease and discomfort among workers were economically and socially costly; they made the bodies vulnerable, debilitating the economy and weakening the army, at the same time they provided potential sources for social agitations, increasing the political temperatures. Fresh air would have to be delivered to make life stronger and more productive; good ventilation should ensure a more docile political atmosphere[2]. Reid’s pneumatic apparatus would have to serve the entire city; his carefully management of the ventilation valves would have to be applied to the proportions of social structures. Air was not only the material which demanded carefully management to provide the adequate conditions to house government, but from the eighteenth-century on, air came to be a material which government should carefully care to ensure the desirable strength and conduct of the body politic.

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[1] Michel Foucault, , Madness and Civilization, London: Routledge, 2001, p. 206

[2] On the political role of sanitary regulations and the reforms of working-class habitat in nineteenth century England see Francois Beguin, The Comfort-machinery in XIX century England, in: Espacos e Debates. n 34, 1992.