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.