THE PUBLIC TOWEL. The towels in toilets, bedrooms of hotels and boarding houses can spread disease unless they are thoroughly boiled and laundered after use, Most hotels, railroad stations, Pullman cars, etc., have done away with the public towels in toilets and use a heavy tissue paper, either as a single towel or in rolls and torn off as needed, which is not expensive and is thrown away after use. In Pennsylvania the State Board of Health has urged saloonkeepers, etc., to do away with the forks and spoons which are placed in a tumbler of water and are used by all comers at the free lunch counter and then replaced in the tumbler of dirty water for the next victim to use. Disease can be controlled better when our proprietors of saloons, restaurants, hotels, soda fountains, etc., employ only healthy employees, free from disease and take pains to boil or scald every public glass and chinaware used by not only dirty, but disease-spreading persons. The barroom towel which hangs in front of the bar in the cheaper saloons for customers to wipe their mouth and hands upon, must not be permitted.

Maybe in a few years, we will even have our own personal lighting systems or lasik eye procedures that install night vision and public outdoor lighting will become a thing of the past.

Additional Articles from the Book of Medicine:

• Cause of Goitre
  
  

  Cause of Goitre. — the swelling of the thyroid gland in the neck, producing the repulsive deformity of Goitre, or Derby Shire neck, seems to be intimately connected with mineral impurities and water. In Nottingham England, where this disease is not unfrequently met with, the common people attribute it to the hardness of the water, and in other parts of Great Britain is found to prevail only, or at least especially, in those districts where the magnesium limestone formation abounds.

   

  Okay I have to admit that this time I had no idea what goiter was, or why it was spelled with what appears to be a French spelling. But I was curious and so I decided to look it up on Wikipedia.  When I did this, I found thisdisturbing pictureof a woman with an extremely swollen neck.

  So as I look this up on Wikipedia, I learned that basically this disease occurs due to a lack of iodine.  It’s not caused by the presence of chemicals as thought 100 years ago,but by the absenceof iodine in a person’s diet.

  Today salt is commonly fortified with iodine, which helps to prevent the spread of this disease.

   

   

  Here’s an interesting history on the treatment of goitre from Wikipedia, which might help with this and more perspective.

  Chinese physicians of the Tang Dynasty (618–907) were the first to successfully treat patients with goiter by using the iodine-rich thyroid gland of animals such as sheep and pigs—in raw, pill, or powdered-mixture-in-wine form.^[1] This was outlined in Zhen Quan’s (died 643 AD) book, as well as several others.^[2] One Chinese book (i.e. The Pharmacopoeia of the Heavenly Husbandman) asserted that iodine-rich sargassum was used to treat goiter patients by the 1st century BC, but this book was written much later.^[3]

  In the 12th century, al-Jurjani, a Persian physician, provided the first description of Graves’ disease after noting the association of goitre and exophthalmos in his Thesaurus of the Shah of Khwarazm, the major medical dictionary of its time.^[4][5] Al-Jurjani also established an association between goitre and palpitation.^[6] The disease was later named after Irish doctor Robert James Graves,^[7] who described a case of goiter with exophthalmos in 1835. The German Karl Adolph von Basedow also independently reported the same constellation of symptoms in 1840, while earlier reports of the disease were also published by the Italians Giuseppe Flajani and Antonio Giuseppe Testa, in 1802 and 1810 respectively,^[8] and by the English physician Caleb Hillier Parry (a friend of Edward Jenner) in the late 18th century.^[9]

  Paracelsus (1493–1541) was the first person to propose a relationship between goitre and minerals (particularly lead) in drinking water.^[10] Iodine was later discovered by Bernard Courtois in 1811 from seaweed ash.

  Goitre was previously common in many areas that were deficient in iodine in the soil. For example, in the English Midlands, the condition was known as Derbyshire Neck. In the United States, goitre was found in the Great Lakes, Midwest, and Intermountain regions. The condition now is practically absent in affluent nations, where table salt is supplemented with iodine. However, it is still prevalent in India,^[11] Central Asia and Central Africa.

  Some health workers fear that a resurgence of goitre might occur because of the trend to use rock salt and/or sea salt, which has not been fortified with iodine. New research indicates that there may in fact be a tendency to inherit an increased vulnerability to goitre.

   

  Interesting, but I’m glad we figured out the cause and the solution for this one.  Next up, Viagra and acne cream,   just kidding seems like we’ve covered some of the more serious things over the last hundred years and now fiddling around with less serious things.

• Muscles of the Shoulder
  
  

  The large triangular muscle of the shoulder — the deltoid — is one of great strength, as in fact are all the muscles of the arm.  If you grasp the arm tightly just above the elbow joint, and then bend the forearm, you will feel the biceps muscle of the arm become firm, hard and prominent; now straighten it again and it becomes relaxed, whilst the muscles on the back of the arm become hard and prominent. The muscles of the forearm are the flexors and pronators; that is, they flex the arm and turn the palm downward.  In each upper extremity or arm there are fifty-three muscles, and we observe here the nicest and most economical method of packing away the muscles that could be improvised, securing strength, giving elegance to its form and shape and facilitating its mobility.

• Muscular Levers
  
  

  Muscular Levers.-These great muscular levers in the body forward on the thigh, and bring the legs inward toward each other, besides moving the whole body to and fro when walking, etc.  The long, narrow muscle, seen running bleakly across the thought, is the Sartorius muscle,  a so called from the fact that it crosses the legs for the sartorial (Tailor’s) posture.  It is the longest muscle in the body.

  When I attempted to look up the word ’sartorial’ in Wikipedia, I could find no reference for it.  I’m not exactly sure what a tailor’s posture looks like.  Maybe its a form of exercise and maybe its something that tailors used to employ when taking measurements years ago.  I’m not sure.  I can almost picture someone doing squats or leg lifts or something working with strength equipment to build up their muscles in some archaic way.

   

  All I could find, was something that referenced the tailor posture for child birth.