The conditions under which homes and their surroundings are kept healthful
in the city and in the country differ in many respects, although the
principles underlying them are essentially the same. In the city the
sanitary condition of homes is maintained chiefly by a system of
cooperation and centralization which brings into existence extensive
sewerage systems, water supplies, and the collection of house waste by
public authority. Regulations are prescribed and enforced under which
the individual household must avoid all conditions which are likely to
prove dangerous to the health of the immediate neighborhood and of the
entire community. In the country districts, and more particularly in
isolated homesteads, the conditions affecting the health of the household
are largely in its own hands, and more individual effort is required to
maintain healthful surroundings than in cities. The farmer must supply
himself with his drinking water and must get rid of the waste of the
household as best he can. On the other hand, the inhabitant of the country
is in many ways better off than the dweller in large cities. Not only
has he pure air to draw upon at all times, but he can supply himself
often with purer food than is possible in large communities. Though he
must procure for himself drinking water, he is, in most cases, able to
get a purer water from the ground than the sewage-polluted fluid which
is the only water accessible in many cities. While he must get rid of
night soil himself rather than have it disposed of by a water-carriage
system conveniently located within the house, he may avoid the annoying
complications of plumbing, bringing with it the leakages of sewer gas, the
plugging up of soil pipes by the roots of trees or by articles carelessly
thrown into them. Moreover, he has it often within his power to acquire
sufficient land around his house to take charge of all sewage and waste
and to utilize it as a manure for enriching the soil. Nevertheless, it
must be acknowledged that when the circumstances under which healthful
surroundings are procurable are under the immediate control of each
individual household they are apt to be perverted through ignorance and
neglect. Conditions may then arise which are not only unfavorable to
health, but which are likely to lead to severe sickness at any time when
the opportunity presents itself.
Standing between the fortunate inhabitant of a large city whose
water-supply and sewerage systems are above reproach and the farmer
who bas it within his power to make them so with reference to his own
wants, is the half-developed village or town, with its chiefly unsanitary
conditions. Here the leaky cesspool still exists, close by the family
well, or by the neighbor's well. The absence of any system of collecting
garbage and miscellaneous waste shows itself by the littering of the
yards, the alleys, streets, and even stream beds with all kinds of
refuse. In some towns the premature introduction of a water-supply system
causes the ground to become still more thoroughly saturated with diluted
sewage, so that the wells of those households not yet connected with
the water-supply are a continual source of danger. In such communities,
appreciation of the necessity for a public control of sanitation has not
yet made much headway. The acts of each family violating the laws of
health not only react upon itself but upon the immediate neighborhood,
often with disastrous results. When typhoid fever has once gained a
foothold in such communities it is apt to develop into an epidemic.
The tendency of our population to concentrate in villages and towns makes
the sanitary improvement of such communities a most important and vital
condition of national health and prosperity. The following pages are not
intended for these communities, for they need, in most cases, the advice
of sanitarians and sanitary engineers, acquainted with local conditions.
Still, they may be of service in pointing out the dangers which may and do
actually beset the population that neglects to dispose of refuse and waste
in a manner which does not clash with the laws of health.
The chief dangers which threaten rural inhabitants are those arising from
polluted drinking water. This is infected from the household excrement and
barnyard drainage, as will be described farther on, and its use leads in
the main to bowel disturbances, typhoid-fever, and dysenteric affections.
It might be claimed that in an isolated homestead the danger is absent
because the night soil from the healthy household can not contain the
germs of typhoid-fever, and, therefore, the well water can not receive
them from leaky cesspools and surface drainage. This would be true if
the family lived secluded from other human beings. As the case stands,
there is much more communication than is at first thought supposed. There
is more or less coming and going of farm hands and other hired help,
of tramps, peddlers, etc. The farmer travels more than formerly. He
frequently visits neighboring communities. The children go to school. As
it has been shown that there may be mild cases of typhoid-fever passing
unnoticed, in a farm hand, for example, who leaves on account of ill
health, perhaps, and who has meanwhile, in his discharges, deposited the
germs of this disease on the premises, it is evident that isolation
nowadays does not exist except in remote, thinly settled regions, and that
disease germs may make themselves suddenly felt in an unexpected manner in
any farmhouse.
There are other important reasons, however, why rural sanitation should
not be neglected. The health of the large communities of people who draw
their food supply from the country is in a measure dependent on the health
of the farming community. There is scarcely a city child who is not, in a
degree, dependent for its health on the sanitary conditions prevailing in
the house of the dairyman. Milk has been repeatedly shown to be the means
of distributing typhoid-fever and other diseases. Any vegetable foods
from the farm eaten raw are liable to become carriers of infection under
unsanitary conditions.
In many parts of our country other causes operate in making the health
of many people depend on the proprieties of country homes. The thousands
of city people, who flock every summer to the country and bring to the
farming community considerable sums of money, should be properly protected
against the dangers of polluted water and infected milk by the adoption
of suitable methods of sewage disposal. Too frequently those who left the
city for the purpose of gaining strength by breathing pure air, drinking
pure water, and eating pure food, only return with the germs of an often
fatal disease within them to swell the typhoid statistics of our large
cities.