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Health & Hygiene

This is a unit that most students enjoy. If time is limited, choose a part that you can use in the time available. Keep in mind that the information is from the late 1800's or early 1900's.
Supplies for a full lesson include:
  • Wash tub (tell students about taking a bath in a washtub and let them take turns getting into the tub)
  • Washboard (show students how a washboard was used)
  • Cake of old-fashioned looking soap
  • Pitcher and Bowl
  • Wash Basin
  • Nurse Maude skit - White apron with Red Cross emblem or old nurse's hat
Cleanliness
Making Soap involved the following steps:
  • Had to use fats of animals collected from cooking in kettle outdoors
  • Boiled with potash (lye)
  • A curd will eventually form like cottage cheese
  • Stir a lot to make the soap whiter
  • It will separate into layers
  • Pour it into a wooden frame that has a bottom to it
  • Liquid will evaporate and then cut into bars
 Picture
Personal Cleanliness
  • Might have a bathtub, but probably not, so would use the wash tub
  • Baths were on Saturday night
  • Washed hands, feet and face in a bowl or at the water pump perhaps daily
  • Hair would be brushed daily, washed once or twice a month (it was thought at the time that washing one's hair too often would ruin it.)​
Other Health Facts
  • A country doctor would give out medicine at house calls or from his office
  • Drug stores offered medicine that was mostly made of alcohol or herbs
  • Black salve was actually sulphur
  • Children's diseases at that time were: colds, measles, chicken pox, scarlet fever, whooping cough, diptheria, pneumonia, small pox, influenza
  • Unclean water was a problem
  • Rats carried many diseases
Medical treatments at this time included:
  • Vaccination for smallpox
  • Drinking and bathing in mineral water
  • Electric shocks
  • Sleep with the window open
  • Air out one's bedding
  • Exercise 15 minutes a day
  • Fasting
  • Vitamins and patent medicine
  • Phrenology - diagnosing health problems by feeling bumps on the head
  • Fever - sweat it out
  • Castor oil
  • Spring tonic
  • Goose grease
  • Poultices, such as a mustard plaster
  • Aspirin
  • Clean teeth  (At 30 years of age most people had lost most of their teeth and many ended up toothless)
  • People were not in the habit of bathing or even washing their hands often
  • Jane Addams worked in Chicago trying to teach immigrants about keeping babies clean and also themselves
  • Quarantines:
    • TB (tuberculosis) was passed from one to another
    • Louis Pasteur discovered that germs caused disease
    • Hospitals were not clean and a movement started to clean them up
    • Unclean and spoiled food was a problem

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