The Gospel of Germs by Nancy Tomes

The Gospel of Germs by Nancy Tomes

Author:Nancy Tomes [Tomes Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press


8 • The Wages of Dirt Were Death

In 1912, Marion Harland, the popular domestic writer, breezily asserted in Good Housekeeping that “the least literate of housemothers has heard of germs.” By way of proof, she cited her “excellent chambermaid,” who upon seeing her mistress take camphor to ward off the influenza, said, “It will kill bacilli, I suppose?” As Harland observed, the germ had become a household word for many Americans by the 1910s. Yet this popular awareness was limited primarily to affluent, native-born families and those who tended most closely to their personal needs. For the millions of families living in poor urban and rural districts, the microbe remained an unknown quantity. At a time when the “antisepticonscious” middle class was purchasing Sy-Clo toilets and buying vacuum cleaners, many Americans still lived in households lacking running water and flush toilets. By the eve of World War I, the awareness of germ dangers and the practice of antiseptic cleanliness had come sharply to differentiate rich from poor, literate from illiterate, native from foreign-born, and urbanite from rural-dweller.1

Changing patterns of disease incidence, particularly of tuberculosis, made these differences in sanitary protection especially troubling. When the antituberculosis crusade began in the 1890s, tuberculosis was still a disease that seemed to afflict the “millionaire as well as shillingaire,” in Harriette Plunkett’s colorful phrase. Many of the movement’s early leaders, including Lawrence Flick and Edward Trudeau, were themselves consumptives, and their cause found considerable sympathy among middle-and upper-class families who knew firsthand the ravages of the disease.2

But by the 1910s, the epidemiological havoc wrought by tuberculosis and other communicable diseases had become much more class and race specific. From the late 1800s onward, the ailments that the gospel of germs sought to prevent increasingly became identified with the poor and sanitarily disadvantaged. Tuberculosis slowly lost its identity as a “house disease” to be confronted by every housewife and metamorphized into a “tenement house disease.” As death rates from typhoid declined, the disease became more closely identified with the unscreened outdoor privies frequently found in poor neighborhoods and with working-class cooks and servants such as Typhoid Mary.3

The narrowing scope of the disease threat by no means diminished reformers’ zeal to spread the gospel of germs. On the contrary, the perception that the sanitary measures adopted by the urban upper classes had contributed to their improving health only increased the urgency of taking the same gospel to the hygienic “heathen.” The most intense years of public health education among poor Americans came in the 1910s and 1920s, after the value of sanitary uplift had seemingly been proven by the experience of their affluent contemporaries. During those decades, a wide range of private and public initiatives sought to democratize the hygienic teachings that had already transformed the homes of middle-class urban Americans.4

Although this work was strongly supported by the male public health establishment, the gospel of germs was preached primarily by female professionals. During the first three decades of the century, countless women visiting nurses, social workers, and home economists went as sanitary missionaries to working-class and farm households.



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