CHAPTER XVI.

RATIONAL SANITATION AND HYGIENE.

We, all of us, like to use things; indulgence is enjoyable, but it generally ends with the day. Few of us “take thought of the morrow.” Neglecting, as we do, the _instruments_ of use, their availability for permanent subservience to our wants steadily diminishes, becoming finally lost. Is it that we do not know any better, or is it that we are really so intoxicated with the Present that we simply ignore the well-known claims of the Permanent? Whatever the explanation may be, it is nevertheless passing strange that little or no care is bestowed on either our external or internal servitors, instruments, or organs, which otherwise are ever ready to keep us well filled with the pure wine of joy. Perhaps it is that many of us find Nature so lavish in supplying us with the means of joy that we are naturally equally lavish in wasting them. True economy--that is, the conserving of means for their effective use--is yet to be learned by man. Especially is this the case with our interior means, our flesh, blood, nerves, vital force, etc. Nature seems so ready to recoup and renew the organic loss incurred by our use or indulgence--recuperation seems so easy--that we simply grow careless, reckless, prodigal, and before we are fairly aware of it the disintegrative process gains an ascendency over the restorative, and thenceforward our time will be spent in endeavoring to cure what might have been kept whole or well.

Nor is it an organ of the body here and there that we neglect or abuse; it is more especially the entire system of organs called “the body.” The body is the organ of man’s spirit. We give no heed to its tones; perhaps we have never caught its rhythm; certain it is that when but a short time in our perverted hands its chords are more or less jangled, and a minor part is played in the grand symphony of life.

The organ of man’s spirit! How rational, nay, how necessary, it would seem to be to keep that instrument keyed to its perfect work!

But the ordinary denizen of civilization has a most ridiculous ideal of physical capability, namely, that the savage--a being altogether “physical”--was able to retain a healthy body till ripe old age without attention either to sanitary surroundings or to the hygienic functioning of his system of organs. The “civilizee’s” fancy picture of the noble savage is not based upon verifiable fact. It is true that we have a few attractive myths concerning savages that had survived appalling hardship; but we are just learning of the innumerable host that have perished periodically of various contagious diseases, and of the countless number (infants, youths, and adults) that have suffered from all sorts of ailments. Alas! how little we know--or, for that matter, how little we seem to care--of the great multitude of “civilized” fellow-creatures whose lives are all jangled and out of tune through subjection to the many ills that flesh seems heir to; ills that have arisen through either ignorance or the voluntary _ignoring of the light of accessible knowledge_!

In another aspect the human race is like an army that concerns itself with its immediate and imperative duties and has no time or thought to bestow on those that fall out of the ranks. But slaves to stern duty offend against Nature’s normality as do slaves to desire; and the former little suspect that their retirement also is near at hand. In health we seldom or never think of the conditions for the maintenance of health. That these conditions should receive our prime attention is obvious when we contemplate for a moment (1) our race of invalids, and (2) the growing unsanitary condition of modern industrialism, involving, as industrialism perforce must, the unsanitary life of the factory, workshop, office, and hothouse home.

Again, with the advance of high-pressure civilization and culture human beings are developing a more highly sensitive physical organism, pitched to finer issues. How urgent the necessity for a greater safeguarding of that organism!

If it be claimed that many of us do live up to our knowledge of health conditions, and that we are notwithstanding unwell, I would answer that our knowledge now is very disconnected, and that when the time shall come that our itemistic information shall have coalesced and formed a system of principles, we will then have trustworthy rules for the acquisition of health habits and become completely normal physical beings. At present most of us are intemperate in one or more ways. We eat too much or too little--too rich or too poor food. So it is with our drinking, our sleeping, our sporting, our enjoyment of this or that excitement--the quantity or the quality of each of these is not well adapted or proportioned to the conditions of normality.

Let me offer the health-seeker a few indications of the sanitary and hygienic requirements demanded by Nature’s normality. In our family and household life, to carry into execution daily hygienic measures, it is essential that we have ample, accessible conveniences for the necessary ablution of the body, externally and internally. How extremely rare it is, however, that bath-tubs and water-closets are found in sufficient quantity and suitable quality in our apartments. As household fixtures they are usually about as scarce as hens’ teeth.

In New York City a house with from eight to sixteen persons is restricted to the use of one water-closet and one bath-tub. On these (and a laundry and servants’ privy in the basement) there is the tax of ten dollars a year. Now, should that rare human product, an enlightened and humane owner, put in eight more bath-tubs and water-closets for the proper accommodation of his sixteen guests, so that each suite of sleeping apartments should have its appropriate conveniences, he would have to pay an additional tax of forty dollars a year. Is this tax levied with the connivance of the Board of Health? It would seem so, since no protest from that august body has ever been heard within the memory of the oldest inhabitant. Indeed, the suspicion is not at all unwarranted that if the masses were less constipated and better washed they would have less use for the doctors, and that, therefore, it is not well to encourage undue sanitation and hygiene.

It must be, too, that the Department of Water Supply has figured it out quite beautifully that a saving will be insured in the amount of water consumed by sixteen persons if they be restricted to one bath-tub and one water-closet; otherwise forty dollars a year would not be charged for eight additional tubs and closets for the use of the same number of persons. Listen to a sample of their logic: “Sixteen persons with eight additional bath-tubs and water-closets would use more water than if they were restricted to one of each--hence the additional tax. We don’t care a continental whether these human beings are clean externally or internally; that’s not our lookout. But we do care that they shouldn’t use more water than just so much, see!”

And does the august Board of Health raise the least objection to this sort of logic? None whatever.

Professor C. S. Smith states that, out of 255,000 families in tenement-houses in the city of New York, only 306 had access to bath-tubs in their own homes in 1894. In 1897 one city block containing 904 families did not have a single bath-tub.

Paradoxical as it may seem, there is, notwithstanding the appropriation every year for the New York City Board of Health of over one million dollars, a prohibitive tax on bath-tubs and water-closets--that is, on cleanliness--prohibitive on all homes except those of the wealthy. Is it to be wondered at that contagious diseases are prevalent, especially during the winter months, and that we have so many acute and chronic maladies?

Let me make a suggestion here for the serious consideration of our city fathers: Reduce the appropriation for the Board of Health to two hundred thousand and give the other eight hundred thousand to the Department of Water Supply, so as to abolish the tax on water-closets and bath-tubs. If every citizen of New York could have all the water he needed for cleanliness and comfort, there would be little excuse for the existence of such a body as the Board of Health; its existence would then be more honorable than onerous. Furthermore, the city, as a corporate body, should manufacture bath-tubs and water-closets, and furnish them at cost. Thus would it insure a great stride toward the health of its own citizens. When the disease-producing microbe becomes scarce, the occupation of the Health Board pathologist will be gone. Hold! Could he not devote his time profitably to studying the habits of health-producing microbes--for there _are_ such? Microbes are absolutely necessary for higher forms of existence, it being now well known that some microbes are destructive or pathological and that others are constructive or physiological. Is it not much wiser to spend our millions of dollars for the prevention of disease than for quarantining it? Inducing, and even compelling, people to be clean is a far better policy than to compel them to be vaccinated.

Now, we pay the Board of Health many thousands of dollars a year simply for making cultures of disease-producing bacteria so that antidotes may be found. The pictures and history of these bacteria are published in many large volumes, costing the city several hundred thousand dollars a year. Scientific as this practice undoubtedly is, it is very expensive--and needless.

Every year thousands of children and invalids of New York receive improper nourishment, or are made positively sick, on milk that is either foul, stale, or ready to sour; and every summer thousands of children die from complaints traceable to this source. Swill milk is one of the great generators of disease-producing germs to which all sorts of “complaints” are due. Does the Board of Health care a fig for the generator? No; the Board is absorbed in watching the antics of the germs! Mighty intellects are searching for malignant, multitudinous mites. Yet there are just a few mites of common sense in existence, which if encouraged will breed quite as fast as the sinister ones. Indeed, there must be one or two at work in myself, for I seem to be urged to say that if our City and State Boards of Health should see to it that our cows are kept clean and healthy, our milk clean and pure, our cans clean and well scoured, and our shops and ice-boxes clean and free from odor, there would be no occasion for germ cultures of diseases brought on by swill milk.

Our milk example will illustrate what germs of common sense would do to ward off all kinds of disease-producing micro-organisms. Rigorous regulations, well enforced, as indicated above, would work in other lines as well. And when the source is gone sinister microbes will not come into existence, and diseases that have resulted from such microbes will have gone into innocuous desuetude.

There should be a bath-tub and a water-closet in every suite of sleeping apartments. When this is the case, there will be a larger number of persons clean internally and externally, and the doctors will be on a hunt for health-producing germs instead of disease-producing ones. Let us start an organized movement in this direction.

Last summer Medical Science went about killing mosquitoes on Staten Island with a little spraying apparatus, and managed to disturb the pest for a day or two from its customary bivouac. Christian Science stood aloof and smiled superciliously, claiming that “there aren’t any such things as mosquitoes; but if they should prove to exist, there isn’t any malaria anyhow.” Good sense might have suggested to Medicus the draining of the ponds for gardening purposes; and, if that were not possible, the filling in of the edges and the making of deep-water lakes for the sport-loving youth, who might be depended on to keep the water stirred up by boating, etc., free of charge, and thus convert a pest pond into a pleasure lake. Pleasure and cleanliness are taxed to-day for disease and pests. Oh, human imbecility!

As to public baths, there are so many objections to them that I cannot touch on the subject in this chapter. But let me impress upon the health-seeker, the public-spirited citizen, and our city officials that what we urgently need are ample conveniences in our homes for internal and external cleanliness--conveniences easily accessible several times a day, every day of the year.