A Handbook of Health, Woods Hutchinson [black authors fiction .TXT] 📗

The roof and the side awnings are the only obstructions to the outer air.

Even if we should not have the disease, if we have these symptoms we need to have our health improved; and a course of life in the open air, good feeding, and rest, which would cure us if we had tuberculosis, will build us up and prevent us from developing it.

Its Cause and Prevention. The other great disease of the lungs is pneumonia, formerly known as inflammation of the lungs. This is rapid and sudden, instead of slow and chronic like tuberculosis, but kills almost as many people; and unfortunately, unlike tuberculosis, is not decreasing. In fact in some of our large cities, it is rapidly increasing. Although we know it is due to a germ, we don't yet know exactly how that germ is conveyed from one victim to another. One thing, however, of great practical importance we do know, and that is that pneumonia is a disease of overcrowding and foul air, like tuberculosis; that it occurs most frequently at that time of the year—late winter and early spring—when people have been longest crowded together in houses and tenements; and that it falls most severely upon those who are weakened by overcrowding, under-feeding, or the excessive use of alcohol. How strikingly this is true may be seen from the fact that, while the death-rate of the disease among the rich and those in comfortable circumstances, who are well-fed and live in good houses, is only about five per cent,—that is, one in twenty,—among the poor, especially in the crowded districts of our large cities, the death-rate rises to twenty per cent, or one in five; while among the tramp and roustabout classes, who have used alcohol freely, and among chronic alcoholics, it reaches forty per cent. The same steps should be taken to prevent its spread as in tuberculosis—destroying the sputum, keeping the patient by himself, and thoroughly ventilating and airing all rooms. As the disease runs a very rapid course, usually lasting only from one to three weeks, this is a comparatively easy thing to do.

Though pneumonia is commonly believed to be due to exposure to cold or wet, like colds, it has very little to do with these. You will not catch pneumonia after breaking through the ice or getting lost in the snow, unless you already have the germs of the disease in your mouth and throat, and your constitution has already been run down by bad air, under-feeding, overwork, or dissipation. Arctic explorers, for instance, never catch pneumonia in the Frozen North.

What the Skin Is. The skin is the most wonderful and one of the most important structures in the body. We are prone to think lightly of it because it lies on the surface, and to speak of it as a mere coating, or covering—a sort of body husk; but it is very much more than this. Not only is it waterproof against wet, a fur overcoat against cold, and a water jacket against heat, all in one, but it is also a very important member of the "look-out department," being the principal organ of one of our senses, that of touch.

The eyes in the beginning were simply little colored patches of the skin, sunk into the head for the purpose of specializing on the light-rays. The smelling areas of the nose also were pieces of the skin, as were also the ears. Not only so, but—although it is a little hard for you to understand how this could have happened—the whole brain and nervous system is made up of folds of the skin tucked in from the surface of the back; so that we can say that the skin, with the organs that belong to it and have grown from it—the eyes, nose, ears, brain, and nerves—forms the most wonderful part of the body. Everything that we know of the world outside of us is told us by the skin and the look-out organs that have grown out of it. The skin is not only the surface part and coating of the body, far superior to any six different kinds of clothing which have yet been invented, but it is related to, and assists in, the work of nearly half the organs in the body. Not only all that we learn by touch and pressure, but everything that we know of heat and cold, of moisture and dryness, and most of pain, comes to us through our skin, through the little bulbs on the ends of the nerve twigs in it. It also helps the lungs to breathe, the kidneys to purify the blood, and the heart to control the flow of blood through the body.

A healthy skin is of very great importance; and part of this health we can secure directly, by washing and bathing, scrubbing and kneading and rubbing, because the skin lies right on the surface, where we can readily get at it. But, on the other hand, no amount of attention from the outside alone will keep it healthy. All the organs inside the body must be kept healthy if the skin is to be kept in good condition. Although the external washing and cleaning are very important, the greater part of the work of developing a healthy skin and a good complexion must be done from the inside.

The Two Layers which Make Up the Skin. Like our "internal skin," the mucous membrane, which lines our stomach and bowels, the skin is made up of two layers—a deeper, or basement, sheet, woven out of tough strands of fibrous stuff (derma); and a surface layer (epidermis) composed of cells lying side by side like the bricks in a pavement, or the tiles on a floor, and hence called "pavement" (epithelial) cells. These pavement cells are fastened on the basement membrane much as the kernels of corn grow on a cob; only, instead of there being but one layer, as on a cob of corn, there are a dozen or fifteen of them, one above the other, each one dovetailing into the row below it, as the corn kernels do into the surface of the cob. As they grow up toward the surface from the bottom, they become flatter and flatter, and drier, until the outer surface layer becomes thin, fine, dry, slightly greasy scales, like fish-scales, of about the thickness of the very finest and driest bran.