The Dirty Secret About How Our Hands Spread Disease

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There is no act of life so dangerous to others,” fumed physician Robert Eccles in 1909, “as carelessness concerning the condition of our hands.” He really meant it. In a seven-page rant titled “Dirty Hands,” published in the Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette of New York City, Eccles blamed filthy fingers for the deadliest crimes of the age.

Causing more deaths than “bullets, poisons, railway accidents and earthquakes combined,” the human hand was a weapon of mass destruction that extinguished innocent lives by the hour, according to this Brooklyn-based doctor.

And Eccles was fighting back. With ample ammunition from research in bacteriology, a field in its heyday by the close of the 19th century, he had scientific proof that uncleanliness could transform hands into petri dishes of pathogens. “Until the HABIT is established of purifying the hands, both timely and properly, no lessening of this human misery seems possible under existing conditions,” Eccles declared…..Story continues…