[6] pp. 13 sq.
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CHAPTER VI
HEALTH
About one-fourth of all the poverty that has come within the scope of charitable investigation is directly caused by sickness. "In both American and English experience," writes Warner, "the percentage attributable to this cause sinks but once slightly below fifteen and never quite reaches thirty. The average is between twenty and twenty-five. This is one of the most significant facts brought out by these tables [of the statistical causes of poverty]. It is not one which the author anticipated when the collection of statistics began; and yet it has been confirmed and reconfirmed in so many ways that the conclusion seems inevitable that the figures set forth real and important facts. Personal acquaintance with the destitute classes has further convinced him that most of the {96} causes of poverty result from or result in a weakened physical and mental constitution, often merging into actual disease." [1]
This fact gives added importance to all the efforts of modern charity to secure improved dwellings, open spaces, cheap baths, and better municipal sanitation for the poor. But improvement in these matters cannot come entirely from without; "the model tenement implies a model tenant." As a London authority puts it: "The condition of the house may degrade its occupants. The careless life and habits of the occupants will spoil the house, and make it filthy and unhealthy." The friendly visitor should try to make the family healthily discontented with unsanitary surroundings, and so prepare them for better quarters. Removing families from unfit tenements is not enough, however, if these tenements are almost immediately reoccupied. Their condition should be reported to the Board of Health, and, if condemned, we should see that no one else is permitted to move into them.
I have often noticed that charity agents, {97} who work habitually in poor neighborhoods, get so accustomed to bad sanitary conditions that they hardly notice them. Volunteer workers are not so likely to fall into this error, though it is possible for volunteers to be very unobservant. They often feel that things are all wrong, without being able to state the specific difficulties. An observant visitor will learn the condition of the cellar, walls, yard, plumbing, and outhouses; will learn to take the cubic contents of a room in order to find out the air space for each sleeper; will learn the family method of garbage disposal; will see how the rooms are ventilated; and will learn all these things without asking many questions. Dampness is a very common cause of sickness; when the children cough it is a very simple matter to ask about the cellar, and even get permission to see it.
The prejudice against fresh air, especially night air, is a difficult one to overcome. One mother, who kept her children scrupulously clean, could never understand the value of fresh air until a visitor explained to her how air was polluted by the soiled air that we {98} breathed out, just as water was polluted when we washed our hands in it. When the children breathed this soiled air in again it made them "dirty inside"; and this homely statement left such an unpleasant picture in the mother's mind that her rooms were always well ventilated afterward.
It is difficult to ventilate a small room without making a draft, but, next to the chimney, the upper sash is the simplest ventilator, and should not be immovable, as it is in many small houses. A board about five inches wide under the lower sash will make a current of air between the upper and lower sashes, and, better still, two pieces of elbow pipe with dampers, fixed in the board, will throw a good current of air upward into the room. Another ventilator can be made by tacking a strip of loosely woven material to the upper sash and to the top of the window-frame. When the upper sash is dropped, the stuff is drawn taut over the opening, and, while permitting air to pass through, breaks the current.
Equal in importance with fresh air inside the house is exercise out of doors. I was {99} shocked some years ago to find that, of six Sunday-school boys who went with me on a little trip to our largest city park, five had never been there before. This had not been due to lack of time or money, though they had very little of either; but its sole cause had been lack of enterprise.