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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

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.)​

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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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