The Spectator at war: A breath of fresh air

From ‘The Open-Air Hospital at Cambridge’, The Spectator, 3 July 1915:

We are all familiar with the open-air treatment of various diseases, and particularly of tuberculosis, but no such startling lesson on the value of open air for wounds, and one may say for practically all diseases, has been given to us before. Even diseases like pneumonia and bronchitis, which by intelligent doctors are still commonly sheltered from any rigours of temperature, have followed an extraordinarily prosperous course in the open-air wards at Cambridge. Of course in winter the wards were bitterly cold. That did not matter much to patients who had plenty of blankets and hot-water bottles. The real sufferers were the nurses. But they cheerfully put up with the discomfort when they marked the unprecedented progress of their patients. Since the establishment of the hospital six thousand six hundred patients have been received, with a death rate of only 4.6