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.
CHAPTER XVII.
Personal Cleanliness.
At the close of my last chapter I referred to the ever-recurring problem of public baths. Annually its agitation is renewed in lectures and newspapers; public bathing is voted without disagreement the thing of things needful to render the laity—i. e., the labor population—physically pure. It is the long-felt want; but, like the longed-for walk of the annual Sunday-school parade, it is soon done and gone. Still, we must have patience with those dear souls, our ethical teachers of the press and platform, for taking such a deep, sentimental, though unscientific, interest in the welfare of the unclean. Owing to the non-existence of home facilities for cleanliness among the working class, the accumulations of soil and exudation during the long fall, winter, and spring months are so great that their bodies become too rank and malodorous for the nostrils of the refined. Consequently, as all animals seek the tepid water of the summer, and as man is no exception to a capacity for laving in the circumambient fluid, to three-fourths of the population of this metropolis it must be a glorious perennial treat to dip in the river, bay, or sea; and it must indeed be a dire necessity to those that have managed to survive contagious and other diseases during their long immurement. Without this summer cleansing few animals, bestial or human, would run half their average careers. It is accordingly not strange that during the summer a bath in open water is a daily hygienic necessity and source of joy to thousands of creatures.
Now, it is just because godliness appears in the wake of cleanliness that I made so strong a plea in my last chapter for ample bath-tubs and water-closets. For I do not approve, nay, I emphatically condemn, the system of public baths along the shores of our rivers and bay. Their waters are contaminated by numerous sewers, and bathers have contracted many contagious diseases that have become epidemic in neighborhoods. Note especially the annoying eye troubles that follow in the wake of such bathing. Of course, the sport and exercise involved in open-water bathing are highly commendable; but the danger of contracting contagious disease, and the outrage of the sense of refinement when contemplating fellow-creatures in the act of stirring up polluted waters, should call a halt to our encouragement of public bathing in and around our metropolitan water fronts. These waters are surely anything but a means of cleanliness.
The water-closet, however, is of far greater importance than the bath-tub, and especially than the public water-gymnasium—which last is so much lauded by some of our misguided philanthropists. Intestinal foulness, as a prolific source of disease, is of far more serious importance than surface foulness. However, both the bath-tub and the water-closet are indispensable to every suite of rooms.
Another need imperatively demanded by the exigencies of city life is the establishment of public water-closets at several thousand convenient centers throughout this great city. At present the male population, when away from their residences, are obliged to make use of a near-by saloon—a most uncertain resort, and one in which courtesy will generally constrain them to imbibe intoxicants nolens volens. The female population have not even the saloon as a resort, and can relieve themselves only when in the vicinity of department stores. American enterprise can improve in many respects on the several European models of public-relief stations. The public is becoming conscious of its needs and rights in this respect; and one of the sanitary evolutions of city life—congested as it is—will be ample and cleanly public accommodations for intestinal relief.