Letters to Persons Who Are Engaged in Domestic Service

by Catharine Esther Beecher

But it is a far greater misfortune to persons in your situation to lose health, than to

persons who have wealth and a comfortable home.

When you are sick, you have no parents or family friends around you, to nurse and sympathize; you know that the family you live in have not only lost your services, but are obliged to wait upon you, and you feel that you are a burden. You may have no home to go to, or your home may be so comfortless that you had rather stay among strangers; your wages stop, and if you have any little earnings laid up, they must go to pay for medicines and a physician.

All these things make it of the utmost consequence, that you take good care of your health. And yet, I am sorry to say, that I know of no class of persons who seem to be so careless and imprudent in regard to health. We see domestics go out from the wash-tub in a profuse perspiration, to stand in the wind and hang out wet clothes, and that too, without any thing on the head, or any shawl or cloak on. We see them go out in leaky shoes and wet their feet, and then sit a whole evening in

company, or a meeting, with their feet wet and cold.

We see them sleeping in close chambers, or sitting hour after hour in crowded rooms for religious worship, breathing an atmosphere that is absolutely poisonous, without knowing that they are thus injuring their health. And there are many other ways in which they are wearing down their constitutions, without being aware of it.

I do not think I can possibly make you feel the importance of the advice I am about to offer, without your understanding more than you do, about the construction of your own bodies. And I wish I could get you to read a few chapters in a book I have written called “Domestic Economy,” in which I have described how the interior of your bodies is formed, and drawn pictures to explain what I say, so that I think you could easily understand the matter. And if you ever come across that work, I hope you will read the Chapter on the Care of Health, and the five or six chapters that follow it.

But I will here tell you some things, which I think you can understand without any pictures.

You know that we take food and drink into our stomach to support and continue life. Now this food is changed into a soft mass in the stomach, and then passes through long winding intestines, that are folded up below the stomach. As it passes through these intestines, there are multitudes of little hollow tubes, small as hairs, that pump out the nourishment and carry it to a particular blood-vessel, when it is emptied into the heart, and mixes with the blood. This is the way the blood is constantly renewed. Now it is the blood that thus conveys strength and nourishment to every part of the body. There is no part of the body, within or without, that has not a vast many small blood-vessels, running in every direction, that carry the blood to nourish all parts. But there are more blood-vessels in the skin than anywhere else, so that the quantity of blood in our skin is greater than all that is to be found, in all the rest of the body put together. All the matter received from our food which is nourishing and

useful, is taken up by the different parts of the body, and the rest is thrown out by the lungs, the bowels, the bladder and the skin. When we draw air into our lungs, the noxious and useless portions of the blood in the lungs, combine with it, and are then sent out of our lungs. The bowels and bladder also, eject a portion of useless matter from the body. But the chief labour of relieving the body from useless matter in the blood, is done by the skin.