The military engineers and hygiene in barracks in the second half of the 19th century

During the second half of the nineteenth century the common epidemiologic theory supposed that diseases used to spread through the inhaling of “miasmas” or “exhalations”. At the same time the clear bad influence on general health due to high concentration of carbon dioxide was highlighted. This led to a series of studies and researches directed to guarantee an adequate room ventilation, in particular in lavatories and in rooms with high concentrations of people at the same time. Following these studies there were the ones focusing on building protection from dampness raising from the ground and the realizing of waterworks and sewage systems. Thanks to medical studies and recent advances in technical physics, a new field of research and experimentation in construction techniques developed: sanitary engineering. The subject found immediate and vast diffusion among Italian Military Engineers – whose institutes for technical training where right in Turin – who knew European experimentations thanks to foreign technical writings and thanks to missions abroad for study purposes, and from the early years after unification they themselves elaborated studies and experimentation on this topic. Among these the most important were the prototypes of ventilation chimneys by Biagio De Benedictis and the privative for a washer siphon for latrines elaborated by Federico Pescetto. This subject had a strong influence on the design of barracks and military hospitals on different scales: urban location of settlements, morphology of the buildings, dimensional standards for the dormitories, constructive details for lavatories, showers, kitchens, stoves, ventilation chimneys and windows, and the criteria for the choice of materials. The sources for the research are the military technical journals – such as the Giornale del Genio Militare, the Giornale di Artiglieria e Genio, the Rivista di Artiglieria e Genio, the building handbooks for the Military Engineers’ School, military archives, and coeval civil engineering bibliography.