Western Illinois University

A Foundation for Sustainable Rural Community Development

Health in the Open Country

From The Report of the Country Life Commission (text) (p. 36-46):

  • Theoretically the farm should be the most healthful place in which to live, and there are numberless farm-houses, especially of the farm owner class, that possess most excellent modern sanitary conveniences (p. 45).
  • It is a fact that there are also numberless other farm houses, especially of the tenant class, and even numerous rural school houses, that do not have the rudiments of sanitary arrangement (p. 45).
  • There are many questions of nationwide importance, such as soil, milk, and water pollution; too much visiting in case of contagious diseases; patent medicines, advertising quacks, and intemperance; feeding of offal to animals at local slaughterhouses and general insanitary conditions of those houses not under federal or other rigid sanitary control; in some regions unwholesome and poorly prepared and monotonous diet; lack of recreation; too long hours of work (p. 45).
  • In general, the rural population is less safeguarded by boards of health than is the urban population. The physicians are farther apart and are called in later in case of sickness, and in some districts of medical attendance are relatively more expensive (p. 45).
  • The necessity for disease prevention is therefore self-evident, and it becomes even more emphatic when we recall that infection may be spread from farms to cities in the streams and also in the milk, meat, and other farm products (p. 45).
    • Quite aside from the humanitarian point of view, the aggregate annual loss to the nation from insanitary conditions on the farms must, when expressed in money values, reach an enormous sum, and a betterment of these conditions is a nation-wide obligation (p. 45).
    • How and what to eat, the nature of disease, the importance of fresh air, the necessity of physical training even on the farm, the ineffectiveness or even the danger of strums, the physical evils of intemperance, all should be known in some useful degree to every boy and girl on leaving school (p. 46).
  • We think that the Federal Government should be given the right to send its health officers into various States on request of these States at any time, for the purpose of investigating and controlling public health; it does not now have this right except at quarantine stations, although it may attend to diseases of domestic animals. It should also engage in publicity work on this subject (p. 46).