2o TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



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. Further- 

 more, besides the frank cases of disease there will always be the unrecog- 

 nized 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 num- 

 bers 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 purifica- 

 tion 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 build- 

 ing 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 applica- 

 tions 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. 



