The Drain Detectives

It is the duty of every householder to ascertain for himself whether his own house is free from well-known dangers to health. This duty is of surpassing urgency in a house where a woman is about to become a mother, or a surgical operation is about to be performed. We employ Illness and Death as our drain detectives. Whenever gas from sewers or the emanation from a leaking drain, a cesspool, or a fouled well makes its way into a house, the inmates are in imminent danger of typhoid fever, diphtheria, or other febrile ailments. Sewer gas enters a house most rapidly at night when windows are shut and is potent in contaminating food and drinking water. If a rat appears through the floor of your kitchen or cellar and a strong current of air blows from the rat-hole, feel sure that something is wrong with the drain. If you are tenants, and your landlord refuses to remedy the evil, do it at your own cost rather than allow your family to be ill. A landlord is committing little short of manslaughter if, by refusing to rectify the property, he saves his own pocket at the expense of the health and lives of his tenants.