Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 80.djvu/118

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114
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
Hall for Army, Navy and Colonial Hygiene.

ancient framers of the laws already knew the great value to the state of strong and healthy people as shown by the laws they promulgated. Food adulterations also received their due share of attention. But the most significant hygienic characteristic of ancient Rome and Greece centers undoubtedly in the methods of street construction, water supply systems and sewerage systems.

Another special room is devoted to showing the efforts of the physicians of those ancient times as being not alone those of restoring the sick to health, but also those of preventing the well from becoming sick. A plan of the sanatorium in Kos shows its sanitary situation on the south side of a hill covered with trees. Mothers were made to nurse their own children or substitute a wet nurse; the bottle came into consideration only as a feeding instrument of children during the second year of their lives.

The last room of classical antiquity is devoted to burial customs. It is here shown that cremation was not the exclusive method of disposal of the dead in classical antiquity.

We shall have to pass over the different epochs that mark the progress of hygiene during the middle ages, which was shown and interestingly emphasized by a great variety of exhibits, collected from all parts of the world and contributed at great expense, distributed through 22 rooms, both large and small, and in which that gradual but steady progress was shown by graphic, plastic and pictorial exhibits from the time when physicians diagnosed disease by simply looking at the urine-bottle of their patients, up to the period when hygiene began to be taken more seriously and entered into the dignified domain of an experimental science.

We must, likewise, pass over the ethnological portions of the exhibition, although most interesting and highly instructive in showing the customs and habits of the different races peopling our globe and their common desire for a long, happy and healthy life.

In leaving the historical and ethnological groups of the exhibition,