How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern ScienceFisher, Irving
Science
How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science
Fisher, Irving
Hygiene
A very common and at the same time injurious form of air-vitiation is
that from tobacco smoke. Smoking, especially in a closed space such as a
smoking-room or smoking-car, vitiates the air very seriously, for smoker
and non-smoker alike.
[Sidenote: Dust]
As to dust, the morbidity and mortality rates in certain occupations,
particularly those known as the dusty trades, are appreciably and even
materially greater than in dustless trades.
An accumulation of house-dust should be avoided. The dust should be
removed--not by the old-fashioned feather duster which scatters the dust
into the air--but by a damp or oiled cloth. Dust-catching furniture and
hangings of plush, lace, etc., are not hygienic. A carpet-sweeper is
more hygienic than a broom, and a vacuum cleaner is better than a
carpet-sweeper. The removable rug is an improvement hygienically over
the fixed carpet.
[Sidenote: Bacteria]
The bacteria in air ride on the dust-particles. In a clean hospital
ward, when air was agitated by dry sweeping, the number of colonies of
bacteria collected on a given exposure rose twenty-fold, showing the
effect of ordinary broom-sweeping.
[Sidenote: Sunlight]
The air we breathe should be sunlit when possible. Many of our germ
enemies do not long survive in sunlight.
Section II--Clothing
Air may be shut out not only by tight houses but also by tight clothes.
It follows that the question of clothing is closely related to the
question of ventilation. In fact it is a reasonable inference from
modern investigations that air-hygiene concerns the skin quite as much
as the lungs. Therefore the hygiene of clothing assumes a new and
hitherto unsuspected importance. A truly healthy skin is not the waxy
white which is so common, but one which glows with color, just as do
healthy cheeks exposed to the open air.
[Sidenote: Porous Clothes]
The hygiene of clothing includes ventilation and freedom from pressure,
moderate warmth, and cleanliness. Loose, porous underclothes are already
coming into vogue. But effective ventilation, namely such as will allow
free access of air to the skin, requires that our outer
clothes--including women's gowns and men's shirts, vests, vest-linings,
and coat-linings--should also be loose and porous. Here is one of the
most important but almost wholly neglected clothing reforms. Most
linings and many fabrics used in outer clothes are so tightly woven as
to be impervious to air. Yet porous fabrics are always available,
including porous alpacas for lining. To test a fabric it is only
necessary to place it over the mouth and observe whether it is possible
or easy to blow the breath through it.
[Sidenote: Air-baths]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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