Cleanliness Not a Natural State

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 92, 9 July 1927, Page 13

Cleanliness Not a Natural State

The Secret of Health HYGIENICS OF THE DUST By A. E. M.D. Our conceptions of personal bodily cleanliness are conventional. They vary, as all conventions necessarily vary, with altered conditions of time and environment. Fashion, not obtrusively perhaps, but certainly insidiously, prescribes certain forms of ablution, the ritual ceremonies of domestic cleanliness, which are heeded, reluctantly more often by the child, enthusiastically by those who believe the legend that cleanliness comes next to godliness, and nonchalantly by those who adapt themselves easily to whatever may be seasonable. There was a time when its was supposed to be both correct and communally advantageous to daub oneself all over with blue pigment. Someone, indeed, has tried to show that the woad decorations of our ancestors served a useful hygienic purpose, acting as a sort of extra filter that killed, or at least made innocuous, surface bacteria, and were, by virtue of the slightly acid properties of the solution, extraordinarily effective against monilia spores which are nowadays thought to be as common as original sin and almost as protean in their manifestations.

Decades later a protective covering of filth was regarded as essential to those who followed particular professions. Dirt, as a direct help toward the attainment of true saintliness, was, however, never so popular as its simplicity and übiquity should have made it. The attendant discomforts—due to too prodigal interference with the functions of the skin —of wallowing in mud as a preliminary to quiet meditation, prevented others than the learned translator of Averrhoes from employing this method of “carminative penance,” as frequently as mediaeval conditions permitted. But both Occidental and Oriental saints can be found in the combined calendars whose chief merit seems to rest on the fact that they utterly disregarded all rules of personal cleanliness, and wallowed in things more distressing than mere mud.

A CONVENTION Cleanliness, like truth-telling, is a convention that must be explained to the average child. It is absurd to say that children have conventional instincts, for convention is a changing thing. It is true there are some of my‘colleagues who argue that children have “instinct,” which they define as the specific recolUction of genus conventions. Like many definitions that explains nothing and defines nothing. No instinct ever made a child wash its face. Instinct may make it wipe its face —that perfunctory link so cursorily performed by some of our South African children after a hurried meal off watermelon —or take a plunge into the cool clear water of some palmiet shaded pool, in order to enjoy the pleasure that comes from so perfectly natural a proceeding.

But it certainly never tells a child to use soap, or a scrubbing brush, or a comb. Instinct, perhaps, prompts a child to get rid of the gross disturbing effects of dirt in the quickest and least difficult way it knows of, but ritual cleanliness will have to be inculcated just as truth-telling will have to be inculcated.

In many schools, some attention is now paid to lessons on personal hygiene. Not yet in all. The annual reports of medical inspectors of schools still furnish lamentable proof of the fact that uncleanliness is a weed that is frightfully luxuriant. Nor is the manner of dealing with it, adopted in some schools, the most judicious or the best. The snags of exaggeration that lie under the smooth water of the average lesson on bodily cleanliness are as dangerous as those that lurk in the more troubled depths of temperance teaching.

That “dirt breeds disease” is as demonstrably untrue as the statement that “alcohol is a poison.” Both assertions are half-truths. Some of the healthiest and most normal children—if I may be permitted an expression that is as ludicrously a misstatement as the two allegations just quoted—live in an environment that may be mildly stigmatised as filthy. Some of the most defective children are as clean and live under conditions as ideal as Carl Ewald’s unobtrusive oyster that took lodging in the old bridge pile, and so charmingly discussed the ethics of marriage. Dogma is necessary when conventions are discussed with children, but it should be tempered with reason, and the teacher should bear in mind that when dogma needs elaborate excuse it ceases to be dogma and becomes argument. TWO DRAWBACKS In our South African environment, so splendidly splashed with sunlight whose actinic activity rivals that of of the strongest quartz lamp, we are unfortunately exposed to two environmental factors that seem to make for personal uncleanliness. One is the scarcity of water and the presence of atmospheric dust in large quantities, and the other is the presence of animal parasites. The important part played by both these factors during the late war has been emphasised by all writers on personal hygiene. We do not yet grasp their relative importance in our own schools, villages and locations. We still think of white and native as living apart, and therefore as separate communities, whose ill-health has no interdependence. That is, of course, a mistake, for which every community in this country is paying dearly when it is attacked by zymotic disease. Conditions are tolerated in locations and kraals which will not for a moment be allowed to exist in our municipal townships. If cleanliness is the first item in our hygienic creed, we should insist upon its general observance, and not allow what we teach in the schools to be flagranti-'- violated in practice in places where the native congregates. Dirt, matter in the wrong place, is simply a load upon the machinery of elimination whose proper function is to keep the tissues healthy and active. That, in essence, is the physiology of cleanliness. Uncleanliness of the skin, for example, disturbs the special function of the skin, which is to act as an external lung. It has been amply proved that choked skin pores contribute largely to industrial fatigue hence the modern tendency to suppl” factory operatives with shower baths and swimming pools.

An observant teacher will easily note that the unwashed children, generally, produce inferior work. Very interesting statistics on this point have been compiled. They tend to show that in schools where there is ample opportunity for ablution, the standard of achievment is perceptibly higher than in institutions where such facilities are lacking. Whoever doubts this statement may be referred to the English Board’s report on the desirability of providing shower baths in elementary schools.