A Handbook of Health by Woods Hutchinson (readnow TXT) 📕

A school in which the children are taught the importance of using the tooth brush, are supplied with brushes at cost, and required to report both on their care of their teeth and on the condition of the brushes.

It is good to use some cleansing alkaline powder upon the brush. The old-fashioned precipitated chalk, which makes the bulk of most tooth powders, is very good; but an equally good and much cheaper and simpler one is ordinary baking soda, or saleratus, though this will make the gums smart a little at first. Any powder that contains pumice-stone, cuttle-fish bone, charcoal, or gritty substances of any sort, as many unfortunately do, is injurious, because these scratch the enamel of the teeth and give the acids in the mouth a chink through which they may begin to attack the softer dentine underneath the "glaze" of enamel.

Antiseptic powders and washes, while widely advertised, are not of much practical value, except for temporary use when you have an abscess in your gums, or your teeth are in very bad condition. It is almost impossible to get them strong enough to have any real effect in checking putrefaction of the food or diseases of the gums, without making them too irritating or poisonous. If you keep the gums and teeth well brushed and healthy, you will need no antiseptics.

Not only should the teeth be kept thoroughly clean and sweet for their own sake, but also for the sake of the stomach and the health of the blood and the whole body. The mouth, being continually moist and warm and full of chinks and pockets, furnishes an ideal breeding ground for all kinds of germs; and the average, uncleansed human mouth will be found to contain regularly more than thirty different species of germs, each numbering its millions! Among them may sometimes be found the germs of serious diseases such as pneumonia, diphtheria, and blood-poisoning, just waiting, as it were, their opportunity to attack the body. In fact, a dirty, neglected mouth is one of the commonest causes of disease.

What Causes Disease. The commonest and most dangerous accident that is likely to happen to you is to catch some disease. Fortunately, however, this is an accident that is as preventable as it is common. Indeed, if everybody would help the Board of Health in its fight against the spread of the common "catchable" diseases, these diseases could soon be wiped out of existence. Every one of them is due to dirt of some sort; and absolute cleanness would do away with them altogether.

Diseases that are "catching," or will spread from one person to another, are called infections; and all of them, as might be supposed from their power of spreading, are due to tiny living particles, called germs—so tiny that they cannot be seen except under a powerful microscope. Nine-tenths of these disease germs are little plants of the same class as the moulds that grow upon cheese or stale bread, and are called bacteria, or bacilli. The different kinds of bacteria, or bacilli, are usually named after the diseases they produce, or else after the scientists who discovered them. For instance, the germ that causes typhoid fever is called the bacillus typhosus; that which causes tuberculosis is called the bacillus tuberculosis; while the germ of diphtheria known as the Klebs-Loeffler bacillus, after the two men who discovered it.

A few kinds of disease germs belong to the animal kingdom, though all germs are so tiny that you would have to have a very powerful microscope to tell the difference between the animal germs and the bacilli, or little plants. Most of these animal germs are called protozoa and cause diseases found in, or near, the tropics, like malaria and the terrible "sleeping sickness" of Africa. Smallpox, yellow fever, and hydrophobia—the disease that results from the bite of a mad dog—are also probably due to animal germs.

So far as prevention is concerned, however, it makes practically little difference whether infectious diseases are due to an animal or a vegetable germ, or to one bacillus or another. They all have two things in common: they can be spread only by the touch of an infected person, and "touch" includes breath,—indeed "by touch" is the meaning of both infectious and contagious; and they can all be prevented by the strictest cleanness, or killed by various poisons known as germicides ("germ-killers"), or disinfectants. Most of these germicides are, unfortunately, poisonous to us as well; for, as you will remember, our bodies are made up of masses of tiny animal cells, not unlike the animal germs. Most of the germicides, therefore, have to be used against germs while they are outside of our bodies.

Scripture says that "a man's foes shall be they of his own household," and this is true of disease germs. They grow and flourish—and, so far as history tells us, the diseases they cause seem to have started—only where people are crowded together in huts or houses, breathing one another's breaths and one another's perspiration, and drinking one another's waste substances in the well water. This fact has, however, its encouraging side; for, since this habit of crowding together, which we call civilization, or "citification," has caused and keeps causing these diseases, it can also cure them and prevent their spread if all the people will fight them in dead earnest. No amount of money, or of time, that a town or a county can spend in stamping out these infectious diseases would be wasted. Indeed, every penny of it would be a good investment; for, taken together, they cause at least half, and probably nearly two-thirds, of all deaths. Not only so, but most of the so-called chronic diseases of the heart, kidneys, lungs, bones, and brain are due to the after-effects of their toxins, or poisons.

How Disease Germs Grow and Spread. But perhaps you will ask, "If these bacteria and protozoa are so tiny that we have to use a microscope, and one of the most powerful made, in order even to see them, how is it that they can overrun our whole body and produce such dangerous fevers and so many deaths?" The answer is simply, "Because there are so many millions of them; and because they breed, or multiply, at such a tremendously rapid rate." When one of these little bacilli breeds, it doesn't take time to form buds and flowers and seeds, like other plants, or even the trouble to lay eggs like an insect or a bird, but simply stretches itself out a little longer, pinches itself in two, and makes of each half a new bacillus.

This is known as fission or "splitting," and is of interest because this is the way in which the little cells that make up our own bodies increase in number; as, for instance, when a muscle is growing and enlarging under exercise, or when more of the white blood cells are needed to fight some disease. Remember that we and the disease germs are both cells; and that, if they are numbered by millions, we are by billions; and that we are made up of far the older and the tougher cells of the two. Except in a few of the most virulent and deadly of fevers, like the famous "Black Death," or bubonic plague, and lock-jaw, or tetanus, ninety-five times out of a hundred when disease germs get into our bodies, it is our bodies that eat up the germs instead of the germs our bodies. Keep away from disease germs all that you reasonably and possibly can; but don't forget that the best protection against infectious diseases, in the long run, is a strong, vigorous, healthy body that can literally "eat them alive."

Grow that kind of body, keep it perfectly clean inside and out, and you have little need to fear fevers, or indeed any other kind of disease; for you will live until you are old enough to die—and then you'll want to, just as you want to go to sleep when you are tired. Remember that this fight against the fevers is a winning fight, this study of disease germs a cheering and encouraging one, because it will end in our conquering them, not merely nine times out of ten, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred.

We are not making this fight just to escape death; what we are fighting for is to live out a full, useful, and happy life. And we already have five chances to one of gaining this, and the chances are improving every year; for science has already raised the average length of life from barely twenty years to over forty. Broadly speaking, if you will keep away from every one whom you know to have an infectious disease; wash your hands always before you eat, or put anything into your mouth; keep your fingers, pencils, pennies, and pins out of your mouth,—where they don't belong; live and play in the open air as much as possible and keep your windows well open day and night, you will avoid nine-tenths of the risks from germs and the dangers that they bring in their wake.

Children's Diseases. We have already studied two of the greatest and most dangerous diseases, and the way to conquer them—tuberculosis, or consumption, in the chapter on the lungs; and typhoid fever, in the chapter on our drink. One of the next most important groups of "catching" diseases—important because, though very mild, they are so exceedingly common,—is that known as the "diseases of childhood," or "diseases of infancy" because they are most likely to occur in childhood. So common are they that you know their names almost as well as you know your own—measles, mumps,