Don’t do anything but just this with rooms where scarlet fever,
diphtheria, measles, whooping cough and other contagious diseases have
been running their courses.
I spoke to you about the hands being the greatest carriers of
infection. They even carry around the germs of typhoid fever. They have
been found on the cleanliest person’s hands after using public toilets.
On the fingers, especially.
You are safer in kissing a person who has consumption, than you are
in wetting your finger to turn over the pages of a book that has been
thumbed by scores of other persons. A person may have the cleanest
habits possible yet be a menace to others as well as to herself.
I watched the other day a pair of young schoolgirls trying on each
other’s gloves. Up to the lips would go a finger or two, then these
moist fingers would clasp the glove fingers and in this way work
the glove onto the hand. You all know the process better than I can
describe it to you. Now supposing that the girl who owned the glove
had rang the bell or turned the knob at the residence of a friend who
was ill with, say, consumption, to inquire how the friend was. Don’t
you see that it was more than probable that nurse, maid or mother had
conveyed moist germs of the disease to the knob or bell push, that the
germs dried but had not been long enough in the sun to be killed, and
this girl’s glove picked these germs up and then you transferred them
to your lips? Dried germs which only wanted the moisture of your lips
to become virulently active.
Don’t wet your fingers in trying on gloves――new or old.
Don’t hang on to car straps with ungloved hands. The same don’t applies
to water closet chains, handles and many other germ holders you will
call to your mind.
In studying the peculiar habits of girls I watched a group in the
“Ladies’ Hat Rooms” at a theater. They took off their hats after much
pulling of big daggers――beg pardon, I mean pins――out of hair and hats.
These dag――pins, were all promiscuously laid upon a dressing table
covered with germ-laden dust, only to be taken up again and held in
the mouth. The same process was gone through with when they again put
on their hats. Pin after pin was taken from the germ cloth and put in
their mouths while they adjusted the angle of their hats.
“Say, Mame, lend me a pin, will you? I’ve lost one.” So out of Mame’s
mouth came a pin, which was immediately put between the lips of the
borrowing girl.
Nasty? Of course. Dangerous? Frightfully so.
Don’t put pencils, pins, string and other articles of the kind in your
mouths. Why does a girl think her mouth is a receptacle for every
little thing she wants to use temporarily?
I have seen girls and women step up to a box office and as soon as the
ticket seller had shoved, with his bare hands, a ticket or two through
the window, immediately grab up those dangerous pieces of pasteboard
and place them between their lips and hold them there until they passed
down the line and into the theater.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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