Principles of Public Health A Simple Text Book on Hygiene, Presenting the Principles Fundamental to the Conservation of Individual and Community Health

Every boy and girl confidently expects to grow into a strong and healthy man or woman. How often we hear a child say, "When I am a man," or "When I am a woman;" but I have never...

These bodies of ours are built somewhat like automobiles. An automobile is made up of a framework, wheels, body, gasoline tank, engine, and steering-gear. The human body has muc...

The body should always be kept at as nearly uniform a temperature as possible. In order to do this we wear clothing. Clothing keeps out the heat on a hot day, just as it keeps t...

We kill a great many of the cells in our bodies by starving them; either we do not give them enough food or we do not supply the right kind of food.

Meat is one of the most important articles of our diet. It furnishes essential materials for building cells, and it furnishes fat for making heat and power in the body.

Milk is another important article of food. The Department of Agriculture at Washington says that milk furnishes sixteen per cent of the nourishment of the people of the country....

Vegetables and fruits that are partially decayed should not be eaten. Even if an orange is decayed only on one side, the products of decomposition--that is, the poisons produced...

Nearly all food should be cooked before it is eaten; but if the cooking is not properly done, much of the nourishing power of the food is destroyed, and in some instances the fo...

The dining table should be the pleasantest and most inviting place in the house. If you are complaining and quarreling during the meal, you cannot enjoy the food; you cannot eat...

We have learned that chewing is not merely a process of cutting our food into such lumps as we can swallow without hurting ourselves; but that the food must be ground up fine an...

The cells of the body need _oxygen_, and the only way we can give it to them is by means of air. Every time we take air into our lungs we are giving oxygen to the red corpuscles...

Exercise is necessary to make our bodies grow and become strong. If we stayed in bed all the time, our muscles would not grow and we could not even walk. If we did not exercise...

Sight is one of the greatest blessings we have. Think how dreadful it is to be blind. If you take care of your eyes, there is no reason why you should be blind; but if you do no...

If you break or cut the skin on your body, you make an opening through which germs can get in. You cannot always help breaking your skin, but you can always wash the break with...

Many people are killing the cells of their bodies by taking certain poisons into them. There are many kinds of poisons that can be taken into the body, but we are going to learn...

We have learned that the body is made up of cells, and that each cell is alive. The cells in our bodies cannot live separately. There are, however, certain animals and plants th...

We shall not try to learn here all the ways by which it is possible to destroy the germs of disease as they come from sick people. But there are certain rules (we sometimes call...

Disease germs get into our bodies in three principal ways: they are eaten with our food; they are taken in with the air we breathe; and they get in through breaks in our skin, e...

The water that we drink frequently contains disease germs. It is not always the clearest water that is freest from disease germs, for the germs do not make the water cloudy.

We take germs into our bodies with the air that we breathe. Since we cannot stop breathing and live, we must see to it that the air we breathe is kept pure.

Certain diseases are given to human beings by the bites of insects. We know that certain ticks and mosquitoes carry certain germs. It is also probable that disease germs are tra...

Germs get into our bodies through breaks in the skin. These breaks may be made by a cut or a scratch, by the bite of an insect, or even by the pulling out of a hair. There are s...

Some germs that cause disease do not get into the body, but grow upon its surface, that is, they grow on the mucous membranes--the skin of the mouth, the throat, and the nose. A...

The germs of diphtheria do not get into the blood through the skin, but grow on the surface of the mucous membrane (skin of the throat), and there produce a poison that gets int...

There are certain diseases, the germs of which get into bodies through our mouths. That is, we eat or drink them. Some of these diseases are typhoid fever, cholera, the summer c...

This disease is not caused by a germ, as is typhoid fever, but by a worm from a quarter to half an inch long, and about as thick as a small hairpin. These worms get into a perso...

There are certain diseases that we know to be communicable (that is, "catching"), but as yet we do not know the germ that causes them, and therefore we cannot tell just how they...

Measles is usually not a severe disease; that is, it does not kill as many persons in proportion to the number of cases as does scarlet fever. It does, however, kill more people...

We now come to the study of a disease, the cause of which has not been positively recognized. We know that it is very communicable; but we know also that there is absolutely no...

How does it happen that those who have been recently vaccinated sometimes have smallpox? It is _successful_ vaccination that prevents smallpox, not recent vaccination; there is...

Tuberculosis, or consumption, has been known for many centuries. It was known long before Rome was ever heard of. Hippocrates, a Greek physician, studied it, and said that if it...

The sputum (spit) of the consumptive and the discharges from tubercular sores contain the germs that cause tuberculosis. Sometimes these germs are so numerous that thousands of...

When people first get consumption, they seldom realize that they are seriously sick. Most of them think they have a bad cold, or are overworked, or that they have been staying t...

treated with best results orally, if the pupils are first made to _feel_ the great danger of consumption and to realize the possibility of preventing the vast havoc wrought by t...