Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 177, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 August 1918 — Aesthetics and Health. [ARTICLE]

Aesthetics and Health.

“The connection between individual health and beauty, though seldom recognized in theory, is intimate in practice,” says the New York Medical Journal. True, extravagant ideas of w’hat is beautiful have caused much nuisance and harm in the way of absurd and unhealthy fashions of dress, but it is to the aesthetic instinct of people that we owe most of sanitary improvement. The removal of filth, so important to public health, and cleanliness in general, is due in a large part to a dislike for ugliness. Medical science is coming more and more to the idea of enforcing sanitary measures by fostering a public sense of aesthetics. The Journal concludes with rare sense: “One of the chief means for the furthering of public health consists not so much in preaching the need of sanitary conditions as in awakening the sense of beauty.”