One of the most helpful offices is to tell the woman where she can get the special article needed, and what it will cost, and to show her the thing itself, in a friendly spirit. Such visits would soon revolutionize the sanitary condition of any community.
Villages need this help even more than cities, for there they have fewer chances to know about inventions and perhaps are less resourceful in making them.
There may be races, as there are individuals, whom persecution drives to progress—who do find means to execute unjust commands—but the people a health officer has to deal with can be better led by kindness and will learn from teachers, if the teaching is in the form of example or demonstration.
It is an incontrovertible fact that to hasten sanitary reform it is only necessary to hold out the helping hand; to encourage the ignorant citizen to ask for instruction and direction, instead of placing upon him the task of making bricks without either clay or straw. There are times and seasons and individuals at which and on whom the bludgeon must be used—the greater good covering the lesser evil; but such cases are less common than present practice would seem to indicate.
The tenement house mother who has only one pan for all her needs and one broken pitcher for all fluids does not readily understand why she must keep her milk bottle for milk only. Who is to tell her so that she will understand?
The men may be shamed into cleaning up the back yards and alleys by pictures of such conditions in contrast to what might result with a little effort. [The famous Cash Register yards were started in this way.] Neglected spots have been cleaned up all over the country by similar influences. Why does not the health officer take a leaf from this book of recorded good work and show conditions known to him? Is he afraid of hard words from the owner? He will have the approval and support of all good citizens.
Health Board regulations may be left at a house AFTER they have been explained, and a firm insistence on obedience may then have an effect.
Why should there not be a constant exhibit of the conditions found within the boundaries of a district, with the changes for the better indicated as soon as they occur?
The Health Board office is now in some out-of-the-way place, where few people ever go and where those who do go are frequently not welcomed. Has the Board ever asked itself why it is often so misunderstood, so hampered in its work? What Board will be the first to take an office on a busy street and put pictures and samples with clearly printed legends in the windows—examples of the evasion of the plumbing laws on a T-joint pipe; photographs of a dairy barn; photographs of a street at daybreak, showing the few open windows, and the one or two, if any, open at the top—these would serve as texts for the newspapers’ sermons, sure to be preached, and back-alley conversations thereon.
Why not? Rival water companies are allowed to show filters to prove their claims.