Dishware

“ I pass over many things, but I insist upon cleanliness." Does she take me for a farm girl, a peasant, a country servant? Cleanliness? Oh! I know that chestnut. They all say that. And often, when one goes to the bottom of things, when one turns up their skirts and examines their linen, how filthy they are! Sometimes it is disgusting enough to turn one's stomach. ”

“ They consist almost invariably of a flood of water containing but a small percentage of refuse food, urine, soap, filth of the laundry, grease—everything, in fact, except fecal matter and the coarser garbage and ashes—constituting the waste of the household. ”

“ Do you judge that the corrupted dishes which a man swallows almost burning from the kitchen fire, are quenched in the digestive system without doing harm? How repulsive, then, and how unhealthy are their belchings, and how disgusted men are with themselves when they breathe forth the fumes of yesterday's debauch! You may be sure that their food is not being digested, but is rotting. ”

“ No, no; when you begin to be sick, then we say, Oh, that is right, and then the vomit begins to work; and how shall the island of Britain spew out all the dregs and filth the public digesture has contracted, if it be not made sick with some French physic? If you give good nourishing food upon a foul stomach, you cause that wholesome food to turn into filth, and instead of nourishing the man, it nourishes diseases in the man, till those diseases prove his destruction, and bring him to the grave. ”

“ Some of the prisoners, I understand, regard the first bath as the worst part of the punishment. They are brought up in dirt, and love it; like the Italian who deserted the English girl he was engaged to, and justified himself by saying: "Oh, if I marry her, she wash me, and then I die." ”

“ In my youth, the pursuit was associated exclusively with laundry-workers, but in later years I realised that, except in that small proportion of houses where servants are kept, every woman is a laundrymaid, [43] and that in every house throughout the land, or indeed throughout the world, the cleaning and the washing are done mainly by women, by wives and mothers, their girl children or women servants. Washing, the making clean that which had been dirty, and making the crumpled and uncomfortable things smooth, was my hobby. ”

“ Neither are Purges without their Abuse and Danger; they determine the Course of all the Humours more violently to the tender afflicted Parts; the Body becomes exhausted; the Digestions fail; the Bowels are weakened, and sometimes even lightly ulcerated, whence incurable Diarrhœas or Purgings ensue, and prove fatal after many Years Affliction.
§ 343. If the Evacuations prove excessive, and the Distemper tedious, the Patient is likely to fall into a Dropsy; but if this is immediately opposed, it may be removed by a regular and drying Diet, by Strengthners, by Friction and proper Exercise. ”

“ As the forces of the prisoners were reduced by confinement, want of exercise, improper diet, and by scurvy, diarrhea, and dysentery, they were unable to evacuate their bowels within the stream or along its banks, and the excrements were deposited at the very doors of their tents. The vast majority appeared to lose all repulsion to filth, and both sick and well disregarded all the laws of hygiene and personal cleanliness. The accommodations for the sick were imperfect and insufficient. ”

“ Various instances are given of the efficacy of human ordure in undoing the work of witches; it was to be applied alone or mixed with garlic or assafœtida.
Take a liver, cut in pieces, and secretly place in the urinal of the patient; if the patient unconsciously use the chamber for defecation he will recover— (“Sagen-Märchen, Volksaberglauben,” etc., Drs. Birlinger and Buck, p. 481.)
The method of curing fevers by imbedding clippings of the finger and toe nails of the patient in wax and affixing to another person’s door-post, is mentioned by Pliny (lib. xxxviii. c. 24) . ”

“ The primitive methods of serving up food and eating it observed by the majority of people then would be looked upon with disgust nowadays by every one. The table appointments were not only very few, but those which were used, like the knife and spoon, were often brought into the feasting hall by those who were to use them. ”

“ It seems that a woman, calling herself the head of the Queen's laundry had gone round to hundreds of Washerwomen, telling them that she had held her present situation for five years, and that she had been obliged to discharge all her staff, because they did not wash the royal linen clean, and also that they got drunk. She was very affable with her dupes, and was not above drinking with them, or of borrowing from them, cloaks, shawls, umbrellas, and other trifles, promising some of them two guineas a week, others 4s. ”

“ The devil cannot be more completely frustrated than by placing upon some of his works human ordure, or by hanging human ordure in the smoke of the chimney.— (Paullini, p. 260.)
“A certain man bewitched a boy nine years old by placing the boy’s ordure in a hog’s bladder and hanging the sausage in a chimney.”— (Idem, p. 261.)
In Staffordshire, to cure the yellow jaundice, a bladder was often filled with the urine of the patient and placed near the fire. (Black, “Folk-Medicine.”) ”

“ If they intended suicide nothing would be easier than to break the glass and open a vein with it. The lavatories contain no such easy implements for suicide. The almost unanimous experience of our prisoners, and of many ordinary prisoners with whom I have compared notes since my release, is that prison life disorganises digestion. The unaccustomed food, the many hours of sitting still, the want of air, the inability to leave the cell except at stated times, and the great depression of spirit, are all of them certain to produce digestive disorders. Bread is the staple food of prisoners. ”

“ Many houses stink so bad, that a clean man could not live in them, nor hardly breathe in them. Some men were raised in stink, and so were their fathers before them. I would not, attempt to bless any body in such places. You may inquire why I talk so. Can you talk in a better style about dirt, nastiness, and filth? If you can, I cannot, and at the same time make people feel enough upon the subject to put away their filth and be clean. ”

“ It is prohibited to eat food and drinks that a persons soul is disgusted by, such as drinks and food that have vomit or feces mixed with them, and rotten moisture and things like this. It is assur to eat and drink from dirty vessels that a person's soul is disgusted by them, like bathroom vessels and glass vessels that they let blood into. ”

“ No horror of the Middle Ages wrung the modern conscience with a sense of disgust more acute than was felt in remembering the treatment of the insane even within recent times. Shut in attics or cellars, or in cages outside a house, without warmth, light, or care, they lived in filth, with nourishment such as was thrown to dogs. ”

“ There is a very close affinity between mental and moral perversion and physical prostitution, of which fact too many are unconscious. Nervous influence preserves the fluidity of the blood and facilitates its circulation, for it appears that simple arrestment of this influence favors the coagulation of the blood in the vessels; clots being found in their trunks within a few minutes after the brain and spinal marrow are broken down. Habitual constipation is the source of many ills. Perversion of the functions of the stomach, and of the circulation of the blood, produce general disaster. ”

“ The mode of life handed down to us by the poets, dramatists, novelists, and essayists from Charles to George the second, unhappily confirmed by the criminal records of the same period, has no 89existence in modern manners: drunkenness is no longer a fashionable vice; the tavern parties, which even Addison did not blush to describe, no longer disgrace us. From these social improvements, and from increased habits of cleanliness, we may deduce the milder form and more unfrequent occurrence of the disease, which poisons human life at its source. ”

“ Paragraph 17 — Some have the custom to wash their mouth in the morning because of the mucus which is in the mouth.
סעיף י"ז — יש נוהגין לרחוץ פיהם שחרית, מפני הרירים שבתוך הפה.
Paragraph 18 — The following things require washing the hands in water [after them] : One who rises from bed, goes out of the bathroom, or of the bath house, one who cuts his nails, takes off his shoes, touches his feet, or washes his head, some say: also one who goes among the dead, or touched the dead, one who cleanses his clothes of lice, has sexual intercourse, touches a louse, or touches his body with his hand. ”

“ We have, according to the extent of the deficiency of certain articles of food, every degree of scorbutic derangement, from the most fearful depravation of the blood and the perversion of every function subserved by the blood to those slight derangements which are scarcely distinguishable from a state of health. ”

“ The sick were attended almost entirely by their fellow prisoners, appointed as nurses, and as they received but little attention, they were compelled to exert themselves at all times to attend to the calls of nature, and hence, they retained the power of moving about to within a comparatively short period of the close of life. Owing to the slow progress of the diseases most prevalent, diarrhea and chronic dysentery, the corpses were as a general rule emaciated. ”

“ The female wash-room should be arranged so that those laboring there, in turning out the waste water, should not be required to lift their tubs as high as, and, in some cases, higher than their heads; and, while washing, they should not be obliged to stand on ice so much. Blinds, also, should have been put to those large hospital windows to prevent almost broiling the sick in hot weather. ”

“ The sanitary arrangements are defective and no attempt is made to secure privacy even in the lavatories. The food is the ordinary mess common to the jails, very often unwholesome and disgusting, flavoured with half heated oil, which stinks in the nostrils and with a good admixture of dust and grit. ”

“ I used when at exercise to hold it out as I walked, in the style of a bull-fighting matador, in order to dry it and shake it out, and I used toilet paper in its stead whenever opportunity offered, but no efforts could counteract the disgusting overuse and exposure of the duster. I determined not to press my request to go to the cells while there was any rational excuse for keeping me in hospital. When my cold was wearing off I had the misfortune to meet with an accident and cut myself with some broken crockery. ”

“ The crimes daily recorded in the police-courts of London and Paris (and much more those which are unrecorded) are a disgrace to the whole body politic; [55] they are, as in the body natural, stains of disease on a face of delicate skin, making the delicacy itself frightful. Similarly, the filth and poverty permitted or ignored in the midst of us are as dishonourable to the whole social body, as in the body natural it is to wash the face, but leave the hands and feet foul. Christ's way is the only true one: begin at the feet; the face will take care of itself. ”

“ Filth is more frequently evidence of depravity than of destitution; indeed, in places where the wages or means are really scanty, there is very frequently considerable cleanliness. If a stranger went into the house of a collier, he might exclaim, ‘What extreme wretchedness and destitution!’ when, in fact, on the Saturday they had received 30s., which before the Tuesday had all been squandered. I think medical men, who are not intimately acquainted with the character of people, are often drawn into mistakes. ”

“ The gradual corrosion of the stomach adding to the labors of the brain in the matter of food mass decomposition as well as digestion marks the decline of power to abstain and the degradation of every sense that makes life worth living. Now add to the corrosion of the membrane and the paralysis of the brain-centres from alcoholics the other inciting causes in the culture of disease, and you have the evolution of the drunkard. ”

“ A scolding and a whipping are both painful—one in mind, the other in body. It is natural for one to seek to avoid pain and suffering. It is equally certain that punishment must inevitably follow the violation of law—whether parental law, physical law, or the law of the land. Loading the stomach with indigestible food brings its own punishment in the disturbance of the bodily functions. ”

“ A peculiar feeling, as if his belly were turned into nothingness, made him want to press his fists into his abdomen. He remained shuddering drunkenly, like a drunken man who is sick, incapable of thought or action. ”

“ Habits of cleanliness can be taught every child. The clumsy diaper can be dispensed with by the time it is three or four months old. Let the mother practice holding out her baby immediately after nursing it, and it will easily be taught to urinate at this time, and also to have a passage from the bowels at a stated time in the morning and evening. The actual comfort secured to mother and child through this habit, more than repays for the labor and patience in securing it. Teach your children to be cleanly. A dirty child is a mother’s disgrace. ”

“ Those persons who abandon themselves to strong drink suffer, from spasms of the stomach, a degree of torture that cannot be borne, and to relieve which they must have recourse to a larger quantity, and this must be repeated and increased at stated periods, until the frail machine sinks under the constant stimulus, the infatuated victim having in fact committed self-murder. Of the innumerable mischievous effects and deadly consequences which every moment arise from drunkenness, I shall only mention two, namely, swearing and prostitution. ”