Civics and Health | Page 7

taken until the
body is offensive, the hands not being washed until their condition
interferes with the enjoyment of food or with one's treatment by others.
There is a point of neglect beyond which instinct will not permit even a
tramp to go. If cleanliness is next to godliness, the average child is
most ungodly by nature, for it loathes the means of cleanliness and
otherwise observes instinct's health warnings only after experience has
punished or after other motives from the outside have prompted action.
The chief form of legislation of the instinct age is provision of penalties
for those who poison food, water, or fellow-man. There are districts in
America where hygiene is supposed to be taught to children that are
conscious of no other sanitary legislation but that which punishes the
poisoner.
Display has always been an active health crusader. Professor Patten
says the best thing that could happen to the slums of every city would
be for every girl and woman to be given white slippers, white stockings,
a white dress, and white hat. Why? Because they would at once notice
and resent the dirt on the street, in their hallways, and in their own
homes. People that have nothing to "spoil" really do not see dirt, for it
interferes in no way with their comfort so far as they can see. Their
windows are crusted with dust, their babies' milk bottles are yellow
with germs. Who cares? Similar conditions exist among well-to-do
women who live on isolated farms with no one to notice their personal
appearance except others of the family who prefer rest to cleanliness.
But let the tenement mother or the isolated farmer's wife entertain the
minister or the school-teacher, the candidate for sheriff or the ward
boss, let her go to Coney Island or to the county fair, and at once an
outside standard is set up that requires greater regard for personal

appearance and leads to "cleaning up."
Elbow sleeves and light summer waists have led many a girl to daily
bathing of at least those parts of the body that other people see.
Entertainments and sociables, Saturday choir practice and church have
led many a young man to bathe for others' sake when quite satisfied to
forego the ordeal so far as his own comfort and health were concerned.
Streets on which the well-to-do live are kept clean. Why? Not because
Madam Well-to-do cares so much for health, but because she associates
cleanliness with social prestige. It is necessary for the display of her
carriages and dresses, just as paved streets and a plentiful supply of
water for public baths and private homes were essential to the display
of Rome's luxury. Generally speaking, residence streets are cleaned in
small towns just as waterworks are introduced, to gratify the display
motive of those who have lawns to water and clothes to show.
Instinct strengthens the display motive. As every one can be interested
in instinct hygiene, so every one is capable of this display motive to the
extent that his position is affected by other people's opinion. It was love
of display quite as much as love of beauty that gave Greece the goddess
Hygeia, the worship of whom expressed secondarily a desire for
universal health, and primarily a love of the beautiful among those who
had leisure to enjoy it.
Commerce brooks no preventable interference with profits, whether by
disease, death, impassable streets, or disabled men. The age of chivalry
was also the age of indescribable filth, plague, Black Death, and
spotted fever that cost the lives of millions. It would be impossible in
the civilized world to duplicate the combination of luxury and filthy,
disease-breeding conditions in the midst of which Queen Bess and her
courtiers held their revels. The first protest was made, not by the church,
not by sanitarians, but by the great merchants who were unable to
insure against loss and ruin from the plagues that thrived on filth and
overcrowding. By an interesting coincidence the first systematic street
cleaning and the first systematic ship cleaning--maritime
quarantine--date from the same year, 1348 A.D.; the former in the
foremost German trading town, Cologne, and the latter in Venice, the

foremost trading town of Italy. The merchants of Philadelphia and New
York started the first boards of health in the United States. For what
purpose? To prevent business losses from yellow fever. Desire for
passable streets, drains, waterworks, and strong boards of health has
generally started with merchants. For commercial reasons many of our
states vote more money for the protection of cattle than for the
protection of human life, and the United States votes millions for the
study of hog cholera, chicken pip, and animal tuberculosis, while
neglecting communicable diseases of men. No class in a community
will respond more