In 1909, newspaper reports poked fun at what they called France’s growing “hygiene craze,” and the examples were almost too strange to believe.
Tea, coffee, and chocolate were being condemned by fashionable health reformers. Fruit was considered unsafe unless cooked or washed in sterilized water.
Servants, according to the most extreme voices, ought to wear gloves that were boiled after each meal.
Even bathing water was suspected of needing purification.
Then came perhaps the oddest suggestion of all: toothbrushes for milk cows.
Because cows’ mouths were described as “veritable hotbeds of microbes,” some hygienists argued that even healthy animals could endanger the purity of milk.
Toothbrushes for Cows
PARIS, France. — France has the hygiene craze very severely; it is carried so far as insistent on the necessity of tooth brushes for milch cows, because their mouths are “veritable hotbeds of microbes.”
Fashionable hygienists have already prohibited tea, coffee, and chocolate on the ground that they encourage gout. They now declare that pure and harmless milk hardly exists at all. Even if the cow is not suffering from tuberculosis, its milk has been contaminated by the hands of a milkmaid.
Professor Metchnikoff has now a large following of French people who refuse to eat fruit unless it has been cooked or washed in sterilized water. Toilet water is only considered safe after having been boiled two or three times, and even bathing water should be boiled.
Servants who wait at table, say the hygiene cranks should wear gloves which are boiled after each meal and dried by hot air, in order to avoid all risk of contamination of the food, and they should, after washing their hands with soap and boiled water, cleanse them in alcohol.
If hygiene is to be regarded, all animals — even the canary — must be banished from the house. They are capable of communicating contagious diseases.
Source: The Columbian. Bloomsburg, Pa. May 20, 1909.
