File:American Red Cross work among the French people (1921) (14779568964).jpg

Identifier: americanredcross00ames (find matches)
Title: American Red Cross work among the French people
Year: 1921 (1920s)
Authors: Ames, Fisher
Subjects: American National Red Cross World War, 1914-1918
Publisher: New York, The Macmillan Company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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and this village, sittingin a bowl among the mountains, offered favorable op-portunities for the birth of an epidemic. It had no sewersystem and its water supply was derived from a commonwell from which it was pumped to a fountain in the centerof the town where every one came with their pails andpitchers. All the clothes of the inhabitants were washedat a public lavoir. The garbage and refuse from thehouses was placed in the street and collected once a week,and as flies were plentiful and the weather warm, condi-tions could hardly have been called hygienically perfect. The refugees had been housed in two old hotels and anancient convent to which each century had added its quotaof dirt. Having no other means of disposing of it theyhad thrown their garbage on to the roof of an annex.Dysentery and pneumonia had carried off two ofthem on the night before the arrival of the Bed Cross,and one child was found dying of tubercular meningitisand three were ill with pneumonia. There were twenty-
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5 s Si ^ «J e8 WORK IN OTHER CITIES 127 seven cases of typhoid and dysentery and fifteen cases ofskin diseases. The Eed Cross took one of the hotels in hand and gaveit such a scrubbing and cleaning as it had never had be-fore in the course of its long existence, and into this reno-vated building they moved the sick, not without some op-position on the part of the mothers, who looked upon ahospital as the final step toward the cemetery; an obses-sion not infrequently encountered among the countrypeople of France. The food furnished the refugees was coarse and ill-adapted to the needs of the patients, but with the con-densed milk and rice and other vegetables it was ableto secure, the Red Cross managed to make up a reasonablygood bill-of-fare. It also furnished the necessary medi-cines. Bad conditions had been going on so long, however,that the fight was very much of an uphill one at first,and, for a time, each day brought its fresh cases of typhoid,dysentery, pneumonia, grippe and bro

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