SANITARY CONDITION OF SUMMER RESORTS.
BY THE HON. B. G. NORTHROP, LL.D.
The progress of modern civilization is marked by increasing attention to the sanitary condition of cities, towns and homes. Barbaric races are comparatively puny and short lived. Very old men are seldom found among savages, and the rate of mortality bears some proportion to the degree of barbarism, while early deaths everywhere diminish as the art and science of sanitation advance. The increase of knowledge and the influence of Christianity have greatly lengthened human life. Science is constantly showing how many diseases and deaths are preventable. These facts are abundantly established by statistics in all the most educated nations, and, more recently, by the careful investigations of life insurance companies and public boards of health. There has been a far greater advance in sanitary science during the last fifty years than in any previous century. But the popular appreciation of this science, though steadily advancing, has not kept pace with its discoveries. The pressing demand now is the diffusion of the art of sanitation—the practical application of its methods by the people at large. The public press, the daily, weekly and monthly journals are doing much in this direction. Some of the most widely circulated religious journals have a column regularly devoted to this subject. Our schools are helping on this good work, and here the art of promoting health and prolonging life should be learned and then applied in the family. Such principles, though they seem truisms to the scientist, should be taught to our youth, who should early memorize mottoes like the following: “Health is the prime essential to success.” “The first wealth is health.” “The health of the people is the foundation upon which all their happiness and all their power depend.” “The material precedes and conditions the intellectual.” The school may do more to popularize sanitary science than any other one agency. When this work is once done here, it will not long be true that a large proportion of our people are still living in ignorance and violation of so many of the essential laws of health. The popular neglect of such laws should not be overlooked in our gratification at their discovery.
Our wisest sanitarians affirm that more than one fourth of the diseases which still afflict modern life are preventable. Great prominence has recently been given to this subject in England and other European countries. Dr. Simon, chief medical officer of the English Privy Council, says that “the deaths which we in each year register in this country (now about five hundred thousand) are fully a hundred and twenty-five thousand more numerous than they would be, if existing knowledge of the chief causes of disease, as affecting masses of population, were reasonably well applied throughout England.” With our larger population, probably a still larger number of lives in America might be prolonged by the more general observance of the laws of health. If 125,000 needless deaths occur annually, that implies 3,500,000 needless sicknesses, there being on an average twenty-eight cases of sickness to every death. Saying nothing of the hopes thus blasted and the hearts and homes desolated, the mere money value of the lives thus prematurely ended every year would amount to many millions of dollars, often involving the abandonment of lucrative enterprises, and inducing poverty if not pauperism. In this lowest view, it costs to be sick and it costs to die.
Modern civilization relates specially to the homes and social life of the people, to their health, comfort and thrift, their intellectual and moral advancement. In earlier times and other lands men were counted in the aggregate and valued as they helped to swell the revenues or retinues of kings and nobles. The government was the unit, and each individual only added one to the roll of serfs or soldiers. With us the individual is the unit, and the government is for the people, as well as by the people. This interest in the people has been manifested in new laws for protecting their health, and by the general organization of State and local Boards of Health.
Their investigations have embraced not only the needs of cities, towns and individual homes, but have revealed startling facts as to the unsanitary condition, and consequently the peril, of certain summer resorts. Cases of loss of life from the burning of hotels have led to the enactment of laws requiring fire escapes. On account of disasters by the explosion of steam boilers, all steamboats are required to get a “bill of safety” from an official expert examiner. But the violations of sanitary laws in boarding houses, hotels and summer resorts have produced annually far more sickness and death than have such fires and explosions. The circumstantial horrors connected with these sudden and terrible disasters produce a deep and lasting impression, and prompt to stringent, preventive laws, while the deaths from bad sanitary conditions, though more numerous, are so isolated as to attract little notice. The patronage of summer resorts is already so large, and is so rapidly increasing from year to year, as to multiply their number and increase their attractions. This summer migration from city to country is more than a fashion, and is favored by such substantial reasons as to insure its permanence and growth. Even city clerks have their fortnight’s vacation for rest and refreshment by the seaside or among the hills and mountains. There is a greater exodus of teachers and members of all professions during their longer vacations—still more, families, and especially those having young children, seek this escape from the heat, dust, and miasmatic exhalations of the crowded city. Though their children may have attended the kindergarten in the city, they find the best sort of kindergarten in the open fields and varied objects of the country, with its wider range for rambles and those freer sports that are so attractive to every wide-awake boy, such as boating, fishing, hunting, watching turtles, gathering bugs and butterflies, roaming in the woods, taking long excursions on the lakes or rivers, climbing steep hills and rocky cliffs, loving flowers, observing the properties of plants and trees, and the names, habits, retreats and voices of the birds. Living much in the open air, nature becomes the great educator, and for the summer at least, the country proffers superior advantages for the physical, mental and moral training of youth. The boy, for example, who observes the birds so as to distinguish them by their beak, claws, form, plumage, song or flight has gained an invaluable habit of accurate observation never acquired while cooped up in a city.
The apprehension of cholera during the present summer is likely to increase the patronage of rural resorts. The condition of some dense centers of population invites this pest. Its most terrible ravages last summer in Naples, Marseilles and Toulouse occurred in the squalid dens so long the reproach of those cities. Our summer retreats should all be health resorts in fact as well as in name. Yet many of them—little villages in winter, with a population of a few scores or hundreds—are too often ill-prepared to be suddenly expanded into cities with a population of many thousands, during the hottest and most trying months of the year. Several State Boards of Health, within a few years, have examined many watering-places and have been reluctantly compelled to make startling statements as to their unsanitary conditions.