Don’t think because you hear so much about the dangerous germs to be found everywhere, that you are certain to catch some horrible disease. True, there is great danger in ignorantly living around these germs, but the danger is mostly in ignorance and not in the fact that the disease microbes are always with us.

The old idea that such germs as those of scarlet fever, typhoid, smallpox, etc., could be carried from the ill to the well on clothing, books, toys and other similar articles is not strictly true. Equally true is it that these kinds of germs do not stay long upon walls of rooms, floors or ceilings. They will stay and breed diseases in such places if they are allowed to thrive under moist and dark conditions.

Sunlight and fresh air are deadly enemies to all germs except those of venereal origin. If a smallpox patient has been confined to a room and after being taken away the room is fumigated and then closed, the chances are that the smallpox germs—some of them—will remain and increase. Hence, to again occupy[116] this room would be dangerous. But if, instead of fumigating the room, if all the windows were open; if every corner and floor could receive the rays of the sun for many days; the last germ in the room would have to give up the ghost.

Don’t think that fumigating and washing clothes or other articles which have come in contact with a diseased person make for absolute safety. But do remember that SUNLIGHT and fresh air are deadly enemies to most disease germs.

There are certain diseases which are carried around by persons in whom you would never suspect danger. Typhoid germs, for example, may be carried around in the intestines of a person who is in apparent health. Now everywhere this person lives, or uses the toilet, the germs are deposited, and if they happen to get into the drinking water—wells or streams—or are carried by the flies’ legs to the food or milk, you run great risks of getting typhoid fever.

Those germs of two horrible diseases which are to be found upon public toilet articles, public drinking cups, upon the leaves of common books—in fact everywhere man or woman is to be found, are not killed by sunlight or fresh air. This subject should be thoroughly understood by every young woman, but it is of[117] too great importance to be dealt with here in a few paragraphs.

The breath of a consumptive patient will not carry directly the germs of consumption to another person. Oh, I know that is what many of you have been taught, but we are dealing with the facts as they are known up to this very year of 1911. It has long been the general idea that disease germs were carried from one person or thing to another person or thing. Now this is not strictly true. All germs increase and thrive in moist and dark conditions. The throat of a consumptive patient is one of these conditions. The germs are sent out into the air of the room in surrounding moisture. They land somewhere; on the tablecloth, in the carpet, or hide in a dark corner. In these places they dry and become dust—germ-laden dust. Now stir up this dust and then you have the germs free to rush into the healthy lungs around them, and then a person runs great risk of contracting consumption.

Don’t stir up a room by dusting if that room has been occupied by a diseased person. Don’t wash the walls or floor of such a room and then close it, unless you want to go into the business of breeding germs.

Knock out the windows of such a room—open it up for the sun’s rays to penetrate and kill off the enemy. Take all carpets out and[118] put them where nothing but DRY air and sunshine can get at them. Do the same thing with every movable object in the room.

Don’t do anything but just this with rooms where scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles, whooping cough and other contagious diseases have been running their courses.

I spoke to you about the hands being the greatest carriers of infection. They even carry around the germs of typhoid fever. They have been found on the cleanliest person’s hands after using public toilets. On the fingers, especially.

You are safer in kissing a person who has consumption, than you are in wetting your finger to turn over the pages of a book that has been thumbed by scores of other persons. A person may have the cleanest habits possible yet be a menace to others as well as to herself.

I watched the other day a pair of young schoolgirls trying on each other’s gloves. Up to the lips would go a finger or two, then these moist fingers would clasp the glove fingers and in this way work the glove onto the hand. You all know the process better than I can describe it to you. Now supposing that the girl who owned the glove had rang the bell or turned the knob at the residence of a friend who was ill with, say, consumption, to inquire[119] how the friend was. Don’t you see that it was more than probable that nurse, maid or mother had conveyed moist germs of the disease to the knob or bell push, that the germs dried but had not been long enough in the sun to be killed, and this girl’s glove picked these germs up and then you transferred them to your lips? Dried germs which only wanted the moisture of your lips to become virulently active.

Don’t wet your fingers in trying on gloves—new or old.

Don’t hang on to car straps with ungloved hands. The same don’t applies to water closet chains, handles and many other germ holders you will call to your mind.

In studying the peculiar habits of girls I watched a group in the “Ladies’ Hat Rooms” at a theater. They took off their hats after much pulling of big daggers—beg pardon, I mean pins—out of hair and hats. These dag—pins, were all promiscuously laid upon a dressing table covered with germ-laden dust, only to be taken up again and held in the mouth. The same process was gone through with when they again put on their hats. Pin after pin was taken from the germ cloth and put in their mouths while they adjusted the angle of their hats.

“Say, Mame, lend me a pin, will you? I’ve lost one.” So out of Mame’s mouth came a[120] pin, which was immediately put between the lips of the borrowing girl.

Nasty? Of course. Dangerous? Frightfully so.

Don’t put pencils, pins, string and other articles of the kind in your mouths. Why does a girl think her mouth is a receptacle for every little thing she wants to use temporarily?

I have seen girls and women step up to a box office and as soon as the ticket seller had shoved, with his bare hands, a ticket or two through the window, immediately grab up those dangerous pieces of pasteboard and place them between their lips and hold them there until they passed down the line and into the theater.

And probably, shortly after, this same girl or woman will wonder why she has pimples, blotches or sore lips. Then she goes to the druggist for a “face balm” which temporarily hides the real trouble. Finally she has to go to the doctor, who finds it is too late to repair all the damage done through ignorance, foolishness and the drug.

Don’t use arsenic in any form for your complexion or to give your face a plump appearance. Some of you will tell me of a girl you know who has a nice plump face from the use of arsenic wafers. “She used ‘to be a fright’;[121] skinny in the face and deep lines.” Certainly, and now she looks to be in good health.

But she is not; she is in a dangerous state, and if she keeps up the arsenic poisoning she will discover this fact.

In the girl, arsenic will produce a certain amount of fat—unnatural of course—in hollows or pits which full growth will attend to if the girl will have patience. Poisoning herself with arsenic makes fat in the undeveloped tissues of the face. This gives her a plump appearance. So will plenty of whisky, and in about the same manner. But if the fatness was confined only to the cheeks the harm would not be so great, but like whisky again, it puts fat around delicate internal tissues. A girl who has plump cheeks from the use of arsenic has also a “plumpness” around her kidneys, fat over her growing ovaries and inmeshing the tiny cells of the liver. Fatty degeneration of these organs takes place for which there is no remedy.

All headache medicines, such as antipyrine, are not only dangerous, but will ruin a complexion; bring out pimples as certain as the sun shines. The habitual taking of any kind of bromide, bromo seltzer, bromo quinine, and all the other kinds of advertised “sedatives,” will cause a ............