It is impossible to estimate the resources of science in its efforts to discover the ultimate conditions that govern the origin and spread of all the pestilential diseases; but its revelations during the last quarter of a century are a prophecy and a promise that the whole brood of domestic contagious and infectious diseases will disappear during the present century from the homes of English-speaking people; largely because the lessons of cleanliness are being learned, not only the lessons of cleanliness of the home, but also personal cleanliness--a form of cleanliness that is more than washing with soap and water,--that kind of cleanliness which kills germs, removes the substances in which they live, and disinfects and makes aseptic and healthy the surrounding tissues.
[Sidenote: Cleanliness Next to Godliness]
“Cleanliness is indeed next to Godliness,” is an oft-quoted saying of John Wesley. Bacon stated the maxim thus: “Cleanness of body was ever deemed to proceed from a due reverence to God.” The Hebrew Fathers, from whom this sanitary principle was derived, resolved the doctrines of religion into “Carefulness; Carefulness into Vigorousness; Vigorousness into Guiltlessness; Guiltlessness into Abstemiousness; Abstemiousness into Cleanliness; Cleanliness into Godliness.”
This religious creed was doubtless based on the Mosaic sanitary code, and was the preventive measure against pestilences which the great Jewish law-giver approved. How generally and how long the “Chosen People” adopted and practised this method of protection against epidemic diseases does not appear, but it is quite certain that in later days it had been discarded.
The Hebrew Fathers could have had no conception of the invisible agencies in filth that made uncleanness such a powerful factor in the propogation of epidemic pestilences and domestic contagious and infectious diseases. It was reserved for the scientists of the recent past to discover the exact nature of the infective germs of communicable diseases, their origin, their development, their modes of infection; in other words, their life history.
This discovery revealed the fact that filth in every form, whether in the rubbish-heap, the toilet, the garbage, the dust of the floor, or even in the folds of the hands and feet, the secretions of the skin and glands, is a culture bed for germ-producing diseases. The secret of the great power of cleanness as the true remedial measure for the prevention of pestilences is now apparent and every citizen must recognize that the obligation of applying that remedy rests with himself.