“The water given out in respiration,” explained Shirley Forster Murphy in Our Homes, and How to Make Them Healthy (1883), “is loaded with animal impurities; it condenses on the inner walls of buildings, and trickles down in foetid streams, and … sinks into the walls,” causing damage of a grave but unspecified nature. Why it didn’t cause this damage when it was in one’s body in the first place was never explained or evidently considered. It was enough to know that breathing at night was a degenerate practice.
