VILLAGE LIFE AND DEATH

Evening Star, Issue 20958, 24 November 1931, Page 2

VILLAGE LIFE AND DEATH

PROTECTING THE COTTAGER EFFORTS OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS How attractive villages can often be, and how hopelessly unhealthy and insanitary the}’ almost as often arc. What steps arc taken to keep the watersupply uneontaminated ? The drains—how do they function? What takes the place of drains where there are none? The cottages—are they damp or dry; have they enough rooms? And what happens when the villager gets ill? Is there a midwife available when the villager's children are born? Is there a chemist within miles? Are there cottage hospitals’ Is there anything in the nature of an ambulance? All these crowding questions leap fqrth from tho report of the Rural Hygiene Conference organised by the League of Nations health organisation at Geneva this summer. The subject of tho conference was health in the village, and by village was meant the English village, the Danish village, the Turkish village, tho Rumanian village, and nearly a score of others, for twentythroe European countries sent official delegates and eight non-European, including China, India, and tho United States, sent observers. These delegates, medical officers of health, doctors in private practice, sanitary engineers, sanitary inspectors, and directors of schools of hygiene, prepared a comprehensive series of recommendations invaluable to the expert and full, of interest to the casual uninstructcd reader. In studying them it is necessary to remember that what was before the minds of the conference was not any Bournevillc or Knebworth or Port Sunlight, but much more the primitive wooden village of the Polish steppes. But all villages have many problems in common. Take water. They may have n common village supply laid on to the cottages. But often the cottagers rely on a well or a running spring or on water caught and stored in cisterns. In all tho latter cases there ought to be special provision against contamination, and the report discusses such provisions. RUBBISH DISPOSAL. Take tho disposal of waste —waste water, household refuse, household sewage. A very homely question—but how does a village dispose of its refuse and its drainage? The Geneva Conference drew up a list of alternative methods it could recommend. So. far as waste water is concerned, you can turn it into a water course provided that tho water course is at least 100 times as largo as the waste inflow and provided that tests show that water taken from the water course a certain distance below the inflow has become as pure as the water above it. But, of course, in many places there arc no water courses available, and for these the conference supplies a variety of alternative methods. Then there is housing—and housing, it must bo remembered, in a variety of different climates. What is wrong, in tho main, with rural cottages is that they are too small; the sanitary arrangements are primitive; living accommodation is too close to stables and farm buildings; there are dung heaps .too near; the cottages are damp; there is no proper ventilation and no good lighting or heating; there is no protection against flies and mosquitoes; the habit of planting trees round tho bouse for protection cuts oil' the sunlight—which the windows are too small to admit in full volume in any ease. Tho remedy for this is partly financial—money must he found for building better, cottages—and partly educational. Villagers must be taught to make the best of the cottages they 'have. On these points the conference does nob indulge in fads. What it stipulates for is enough bedrooms to separate adults and children and also tho two sexes. It lias no objection to house and stables under tho same roof, provided they are properly separated, but it is against living accommodation over the stables. Cbimneyioss fires (this evidently refers to other countries than England) are condemned and in hot summer wire screens over doors and windows nro recommended to keep out flies and mosquitoes. Outdoor conveniences can be quite near the house as long as they are properly constructed and kept clean. DOCTORS AND HOSPITALS. The whole question of medical treatment for the countryman and his family is dealt with at length. How, to begin with, are you to persuade doctors in sufficient numbers to settle in the country nt nil. One way, of course, is to guarantee them a living. That can be done by appointing them as public servants or through an unofficial or semi-official sickness insurance scheme. In some countries medical students are given bursaries on condition that they practice in certain districts for a specified time. It is laid down that one doctor for every 2,000 inhabitants in an average rural district is a minimum, and that that number, and tho area it roughly represents, ought to bo steadily reduced. Hospitals arc another urgent problem. There ought to bo one for every 20,000 to 30.000 inhabitants, and tho proper size is at the rate of about two bods to every 1.000, with the reservation that no hospital can be really efficient with loss than fifty beds. Detailed recommendations as to tho hospital equipment (X-ray installation, small laboratory, operating theatre, etc.), are set out. For minor ills there must be district nurses and midwives available, and it is urgent that even in tho remotest hamlet there should bo someone qualified to render first aid or see

that a doctor’s instructions arc properly carried out. Cold formal recommendations these that fill tho sixty pages in this brown cover. But read them with a fragment of imagination and there shapes itself swiftly before yon the village of a dozen countries with its humble cottages, often picturesque, often squalid, its children being born, weathering their childish ailments, growing up to their labour with tho horses and the cattle and the crops, suffering accident, slipping from good health to ill under stress of weather and toil and infections and airless houses, begetting children themselves, sinking into 013 age. laid out at last in the cottage living room, sometimes by tlio midwife-nurse who brought their children into life There is a vivid humanity behind many a League document such as this.— ‘Headway 1 (official organ of the British League of Nations’ Union).