The Daily News. TUESDAY, JUNE 11th, 1907. DIRT-THE FIEND OF DISEASE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume L, Issue 60, 11 June 1907, Page 2

The Daily News. TUESDAY, JUNE 11th, 1907. DIRT-THE FIEND OF DISEASE.

Dining the considerations of the city ) licensing bench the other day a good deal t was said about the unclean hotel glass. That it is very often unclean there can lie no doubt and that it is essential that . everything, as well as hotel glasses, shall • be kept clean no one gainsays. There is a spasm of cleanliness in New Zealand at the moment, mainly because there has been a plague scare in Auckland. Tt seems to emphasise the fact that while there is .no disease scare about there is less cleanliness. Dirt and shiftiness are the very best friends of the insistent microbe, and it is remarkable how medical men have come to regard the work of Nature as of greater curative value than drugs, and that during the epidemic of scarlet fever in the. capital city all the patients were placed close to the hospital windows, which were wide open day and night, rain or shine. This is the modern medical way of bowing to the power of cleanliness. Ry the way, talking about air and light and sunshine as the prime factors in the leading of a healthy life, there is not a farmer in Taranakt who wraps a new-born calf, head and all, in a blanket. A calf is just as dclicaie a creature as a newly-born child. The child, according to most fond mothers, must be smothered up, head and all, in about twenty-live pounds of woollen wrappings end deprived of air, which is actually a greater essential than food for quite a while. -Also when a horse goes si.-k, tlt.- vet. doc:, not lock him up in a dark stable and cut him out from all his natural joy-,. lie turns him out in a paddock. A man with the worst sickness that over happened is better oil' in a paddock than in a study bedroom v iih all the '-comforts of a home." Old notions die hard, but they are dying surely. There will bo no use for the pill business in another hundred years. Not long ago the kind physician visiting the consumptive patient saw that the kindly nurse put nice thick padding along the cracks of the windows so that the poor patient should not get a breath of the vicious wind. Also he piled all the available blankets on the said patient. To-day he makes the patient strip to • the "buff" and walk about as near to nature as decency will allow. A powor- ■ fill working man may be frightened to . sleep with his window opened, but the I consumptive gets well by living in the . wind and rain and the clear air of Ilcnvn. Abnormal things cannot live in uneleanuess and modern medical treatment of the intelligent sort is ultracleanness —just that and nothing more. Man is such an adaptable animal that ho can become habituated to dirt and still live, but the man who has lived a clean open-air life passes out when stuffiness is thrust upon him. The Maori, even with the smellful shark depending from a pole, living under his old natural conditions and with not much between him and the good air, was a physical wonder. He is not adapted to pakcha dirt and shiftiness and he dies of it. Dirt is so insistent, even under (he most favorable indoor conditions, that one may merely sweep a table or chair with the hand and dislodge millions of microbes that could not live in a paddock. The careful housewife doesn't open the windows for fear (lie dust might blow in and the microbes blow out. There isn't a doubt that on the whole, the New Zcalanders are fairly clean and that they are becoming cleaner. For that matter thev haven't had

nnieli chance of getting dirty—the dirtiness ilml comes of slums and overcrowding ami ignorance. On the whole the hotel glass makes a good text to hang a senium on, and the question of cleanliness is of as much import as the question oT a lurid or the Land Bill or one of any half-dozen oilier alleged vital subjects. One might write a sermon on the foetid bank-note, or the rotting Chinese banana, or the unclean milk-can— all of which have (heir uses us man • destroying agencies, hut we have got into the siuV jeet of dirt sufficiently to show that unaided nature is dirt's brUcrest foe.