Euthenics, the science of controllable environment / A plea for better living conditions as a first step toward higher human efficiency

by Ellen H. Richards

Such experience should give the health authorities a cue. Rules and Regulations should be enforced, but enforced with instruction as to the means of doing. The WHY is not so easily understood as the student of sanitary science seems to think. Germs and microbes are empty air to the street urchins until they have been shown on a screen in a lecture hall or until cultures have been made in the sight of the children in a schoolroom. One whole school district of intelligent parents was converted, many years ago, by giving the children in one class two Petri dishes each with sterile prepared gelatine, with directions to open one in the sitting room while it was being swept, and two hours after the room had been thoroughly dusted to open the other in the same place for the same time. These “dust gardens,” as the children called them, “took the place of the family album” for callers, and spread knowledge.

Hundreds of similar experiences should convince any intelligent, earnest Board of Health that a teacher by nature or training should be in their employ, to be sent WITH POWER, like any other inspector, wherever ignorance—usually diagnosed as stubbornness—is found.

The health officer whose mother was a good housekeeper, not afraid of work, has no idea of the attitude of half the housewives of his district. Having been made as a boy “to get the dustpan and brush and sweep up his whittlings,” he does not realize that these houses in the tenement district have no dustpans, and that no one would bend his back to sweep up litter if there were. It is all swept into the alley or the street. Cheap, long-handled dustpans would be valuable sanitary implements. As has been elsewhere suggested, the garbage question in the tenement house needs study and must be solved by a practical housewife. There are such, and Boards of Health are wasting effort and the town’s money until they avail themselves of this help in the enforcement of their rules.

All Health Boards use the strong arm of the law, i. e., a police inspector’s club, to drive the ignorant and careless householder to keep his premises from becoming a nuisance. The newly-arrived, prospective citizen, or more often citizeness, fails to understand what it is all about—neither the words nor the pantomime convey an idea, except that this country is topsy-turvy anyway, for everything is different in this new land.

In the process of learning what not to do, the dwellers in the alleys flee when the health officer appears, and oppose a stubborn indifference to his threats. When his back is turned, matters go on as before and nothing is gained, but an opportunity is lost. Law is a potent educator when rightly applied, but it may work more harm than good.

Rules of action clearly explained are soon accepted—like traffic rules, notification of contagious diseases, disinfection, etc.

The placing on the force of each town of at least one specially trained “Explainer” would result in cleaner back yards and less illness and, better than all else, a more friendly feeling between the officials and those they honestly wish to help; for I do not think there is often justification for such remarks as were made to me by a shrewd California countryman when I was showing him about in the traveling exhibit, the sanitation car: “Oh, this is all to get a job. It’s another form of graft—to get some money to spend.”

It is true that the value of many health measures does not appear on the surface. Sometimes it is necessary to wait for vital statistics to prove a gain.

It is beginning to be thrown in the faces of sanitary authorities that the laboratory wisdom does not reach the street; that there is not enough, or rapid enough, improvement in general conditions. Newspapers are ready, for the most part, to disseminate information and benevolent societies write tracts, but we must remember how little WORDS mean—especially printed words—to those unaccustomed to acquiring information that way.

The actual showing in an alley of the process of cleaning up; the going into a house and opening the windows at the top and tacking on a wire netting to keep out the flies; the actual cleaning of the garbage pail, perhaps, or at least the standing by and seeing that it is properly done—all such actual doing, even if it is done only in one house on a street, will spread the information all over the neighborhood.