Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/24

20 and elbow-grease far more effectively than by formaldehyde or any other disinfectant.

The attempt to prevent the discharges of the sick from being spread abroad can, of course, only be partially successful at best. Furthermore, besides the frank cases of disease there will always be the unrecognized and in some cases unrecognizable, carriers. We must invoke here our second line of defence, the protection of the portal of the mouth against the infective germs, always likely to be present about us. This means the cultivation of an instinct of discrimination which I call the aseptic sense, an instinct which automatically keeps out of the mouth everything not bacteriologically clean. I have a baby of five who a year ago when told to open a door said, "Why mother just touched that handle and her cold germs are on it." At the kindergarten the children hold each other's hands, pass objects from one to another, work with common modeling clay, and then eat their lunch. My little girl is the only one who washes her hands first and I believe nothing could make her omit that ceremony. There is no phobia in this, no dread of "germs," merely a habitual instinct, no more irksome than the habit of taking off one's hat when meeting a lady in the street.

Is it worth while to trouble ourselves with these things? Our fathers lived happily enough without bothering their heads about them. True enough, but our fathers' brothers and sisters died in great numbers because of their ignorance. To-day there are, each twenty-four hours, 200 death beds in the city of New York. If the death rate of twenty years ago had been maintained, there would be 130 more. A forty per cent. decrease in the death rate has already resulted from the advances of sanitary science. Yet there is still upon us a great burden of preventable disease and death. The large, easy things, the purification of public water supplies, the pasteurization of milk supplies, are being accomplished. The insididous spread of contact infection can only be checked by the conduct of life of the individual citizen, by the diffusion of knowledge in the home and the factory, and by the building upon that knowledge of daily habits of personal cleanliness, which shall banish contact infection, as the insect-borne plagues have been banished by our emergence from the grosser filth conditions of the Middle Ages. These fruits of the sanitary conscience, these applications of the aseptic sense, are little things, and therefore hard things; but they are fraught with the possibility of large results in human health and human happiness.