Indicators of Health and Hygiene
The recovery of toothbrush and comb fragments at Sites 44PY178 and 44PY181 reflect some efforts to improve individual and family health through better hygiene. However, regular hand washing and proper disposal of waste likely proved difficult because of the lack of improvement in sanitation during company ownership of the property (Thompson 1984:25–27). The enduring privy tradition in the midst of sewer improvements was perhaps due to objections of tenants concerned with higher rents, or the abandonment of a long-held custom, but it more likely rested with the business strategy of the company which would incur the initial costs of sewer connections. Resistance to improved sanitation over so long a period may have contributed to illnesses in some households on Front Street, even though no evidence of parasitic infections was found in the archaeological samples.
Early efforts to eradicate parasitic diseases within mill communities through education and medicine may have led to better health among the Front Street residents, despite their long reliance on privies (Beardsley 1987:51–54). Efforts to provide relief from stomach ailments and other conditions must have occurred, however, based upon the use of self-help patent medicines and prescription drugs obtained from community physicians and pharmacists (Veit 1996:33). The occupants may have visited the Schoolfield clinic but probably only after over-the-counter remedies failed to alleviate their discomfort. Mothers and adolescent daughters may have struggled to improve their own health and comfort beyond that of the rest of the family. Gynecological care was poorly developed in the late nineteenth century and had advanced little by the early decades of the following century. “Many afflicted women lived lives of pain and seclusion because of the ignorance and prudery of the male medical profession” (Veit 1996:40). These aspects of health, along with the long-term, unsanitary conditions of backyard landscapes, provide a dismal image of life along Front Street consistent with Edward Beardsley's “...history of neglect...” characterization of the treatment of the early twentieth-century Southern textile mill population.
