Home Sanitation by Katherine Ames

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 16, 1903

Home Sanitation

By Katherine Ames

SANITATION means healthful living. To live in a state of ideal health requires ideal conditions.

Few of us possess these ideal conditions. All of us wish for them. Many of us are striving after them, but with vague notions of the road leading to success in the undertaking.

To start right, one must begin with the house foundations, consider the site, and this, whether it be a public or a private building.

The house should be built on the highest point of ground available. For even if it be on the side of a hill, if other buildings are still higher up, the health of the household is sure to be injured by the impurities filtering down through the soil and the air to the level of the dwelling. But we can not always choose the site. We rent or buy or inherit houses which are unfavorably located. Then it is that the earnest home-maker must “buckle on her armor.”

She must make it her duty to understand what constitutes perfect drainage, and personally superintend the work of making or reconstructing drains.

If the house stands too low, and water is in the cellar during rainy seasons, the drain ditches must be dug deep, and if not connected with city sewers, must open into a cesspool at such a distance from the house as to prevent contamination of the air or the water supply. Glazed pipes are safest for conducting water from the house to the cesspool.

The “vitrified” pipe connecting this with the kitchen sink should be carefully cemented to the sink pipe. None of the plumbing about the house should be enclosed. If leakage occurs, and dangerous gas escapes, it may be easily detected.

The old plan of building closets about the sink was unsanitary to the last degree. They were always damp and ill-smelling, no matter how careful one might be, and quite too handy for old stove cloths and wet brushes. Our thoughtful woman examines her house drain pipes in a novel way. If she suspects a leak, she pours an ounce or two of peppermint essence into the sink and the stationary wash bowls. If the leaks exist, the penetrating odor of the peppermint reveals them at once, and the plumber is called.

An excellent way to clean and disinfect pipes is to put a tablespoonful of dissolved lye (concentrated) into each vent at night, and flush the pipes thoroughly with scalding water in the morning. This removes any grease that may have accumulated about the joints or bends of the pipes. Followed by another flushing with copperas water, they are well cleansed and disinfected.

If the house is in the country, and the cesspool a necessity, have it cleaned often. All the undissolved “waste” can be used for fertilizing, and the water can be drained off by several pipes, so as to enrich a piece of crop land or meadow, or by one pipe into a flowing stream. This last method, however, takes an unfair advantage of fishes and children who own the stream, and have their natural rights.

The closet outside should also be connected with the cesspool by glazed pipes, besides having a drawer which is on small wheels, and which can be drawn out often,—once a week in the warm months,—and the contents mixed with fresh earth and applied as a fertilizing medium to any part of the garden or field where it may be most needed. If a box of fresh dry soil is kept in the closet, and a few shovelfulls thrown into the box every day, it will prevent odors, and make the labor of emptying it less disagreeable. In addition to this, in the hot months copperas water should be used freely. It is odorless, cheap, and effectual.

If the cellar is damp, dig deep drains on two sides of it, and connect these with the main drain leading to the cesspool. The floor should be carefully cemented, and the ceiling and sides whitewashed several times in the year. See to it that there are windows opening out on opposite sides to insure free circulation of air.

Be sure that all your vegetables and fresh fruits are in boxes or barrels, and standing on platforms raised from three to six inches from the floor. Never allow any refuse vegetables or fruit in the cellar, not so much as a decaying cabbage leaf.

Sprouting potatoes and turnips in the spring are dangerous. They should be carried out and aired in the sunshine, the sprouts broken off, and then returned to the cellar in fresh dry boxes or barrels.

This foundation “story” of the house should be swept every week, and aired all the time, except in freezing weather. The milk safe is the best place for butter and eggs, as well as milk, but no other food should be kept there. A smaller cupboard with wire doors or sides could be placed at the foot of the cellar stairs, if you have no refrigerator, where cooked vegetables and other foods could be conveniently kept. Canned fruit and jellies should have

the coolest place in the cellar, and be kept in a dark cupboard. It will save time and handling if it stands in front of a window, that the light may strike the jars where you open the doors, and reveal fermenting fruit or anything that needs attention.

If the house is furnace heated, the cellars for furnace and coal should be separated from the cold storage portions by a solid brick or stone wall. Unless your cellar is nine feet high, or nearly so, the platform for the furnace should be laid about two feet below the surface of the floor, to give the upward stand to the heating pipes so necessary for the best conveyance of hot air to the upper rooms.

If the house has steam heat or hot water, this precaution is not necessary.

Is the home in the city or a village with a system of water works? Then of course the water supply is not under control. But it can be improved after reaching the house by boiling or filtering, or made absolutely pure by distilling.

Small stills can now be procured, which are attached to the teakettle, and each day’s supply of drinking water prepared at very small expense. People do not drink enough water; that is, the grown people. Some are afraid of the live germs, and dislike the flavor of them cooked. Boiling water renders it rather flat to the taste, but if cooled in the refrigerator, it is drinkable. The filter removes the coarser impurities, but not the germs. The only absolutely clean water is distilled; of this one is not likely to drink too much. It should not be taken with the meals, but between them and at bedtime. It would save innumerable doctors’ bills if every one would drink two quarts a day, and so bathe the inner man, greatly to his advantage. It promotes digestion by dissolving and carrying off waste from the system.

If the water supply at the schoolhouse is not above suspicion, have a pasteur filter on every floor, and be sure that the janitor has a conscience and washes the cylinders each day. It is amazing to see the amount of awfulness that collects on one of these cylinders in the course of twenty-four hours.

And the children drink so much! It is appalling to consider how careless we are as to what sort of water they drink.

Then they all drink from one cup. This is unsanitary and unnecessary. Many times their little mouths are impure from want of cleanly habits or from disease. Small collapsable cups, say of aluminum, could be made, which would not be expensive, and these should be as much a part of a child’s school outfit as his lead pencil and his spelling-book.

If no cup is chained to the filter, he would learn very soon not to forget his own.

The dainty ones would carry their cups in little linen or chamois cases, but even if carried in the pocket with the inevitable strings and marbles, it would be better than the cup promiscuous.

If schoolhouses or private homes have not been built with an adequate or up-to-date system of ventilation, much can be done on sanitary lines by adjustable windows and open fireplaces. A window open two or three inches from the bottom and pulled down as far from the top creates a good circulation of air and occasions no draught, while a fire, even a little one, in an open grate gathers all the cold air from the floor, and equalizes the temperature of the room, besides carrying off many of its impurities.

If the fireplace was not built with the house, it can be added afterwards, either by bringing the chimney down inside or building one outside at an expense in no way commensurate with the good it accomplishes, whether one considers it from a physical or an ethical standpoint.

The joy-giving, health-promoting open fire would really not cost so much as we pay each year for doctors and drugs to cure quite preventable diseases.

All these things are for women to think and act upon. They are peculiarly woman’s province.—Katherine Ames, in American Mother.