Personal hygiene and physical training for womenGalbraith, Anna M. (Anna Mary)
Science
Personal hygiene and physical training for women
Galbraith, Anna M. (Anna Mary)
Physical education and training; Women -- Health and hygiene
_Diet._—The doctrine has been growing among the laity that the
child’s likes and dislikes should determine what food it should eat.
Thus a finical taste is cultivated and a lack of proper nourishment
follows, and it is this finical diet class of people which forms a
large percentage of tuberculous invalids. It has long been recognized
that a proper diet and the tolerance of it is of the utmost
importance in the treatment of tuberculous patients, but from the
foregoing it would appear that a proper diet throughout life is also
of the utmost importance in the prevention of disease; a sufficiency,
not only as to quantity, but also as regards variety.
It is the patient who can eat everything who stands a good chance of
getting well. So, too, it is the individual whose diet for years has
been perverse, who could not eat meat, to whom eggs were distasteful,
who could not stand milk, who was infected with the vegetarian fad,
or the two-meal-a-day fad, who stands a fair chance of falling
a victim to tuberculosis, through a lowered tone of the system,
because it offers but a feeble resistance to a powerful and insidious
enemy. And the mode of the preparation of the food is an equally
important factor. It has been shown that the poor cooking among the
lower classes is a powerful predisposing cause to intemperance and
tuberculosis.
Influenza is a frequent and important agent in bringing to light
latent tuberculosis, and must be classed as an important exciting
if not predisposing cause. Low, damp climates predispose to the
infection by lowering the vitality. Tuberculosis is more prevalent in
cities than in rural communities, due to the manner of housing and
the character of the occupation.
_Summary of the Present Views of Infection._—The doctrine of
inherited and acquired susceptibility still holds sway; next, that
all infants are susceptible, and that susceptibility lessens with
increase in age; that adults are comparatively insusceptible when
free from general and local lowered resistance and repeated and
prolonged exposure.
As to the source of infection, the consensus of opinion and
ascertained facts point to the sputum as of overwhelming importance;
cow’s milk is an important factor; the food may be infected directly
by coughing, or the dirt and dust from the floor and hands; the
fingers and many other objects that find their way into the child’s
mouth are sources of danger. To adults, both dust and moist droplets
are more often the source of infection than infected food.
_Expectoration._—Careless expectoration is the chief source of
infection. Laws should be passed and enforced prohibiting the
expectoration on pavements, stairways, in all public conveyances, and
all public places.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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