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.)

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