Naval Hygiene
James Chambers Pryor
$15.00

This is the kind of book that brings me joy. It is a serious, comprehensive work dealing with hygiene and preventive care in the WWI-era U.S. Navy. It covers nutrition, diseases, hazards of the sea, health aboard submarines, and so forth. Pursuing this agenda, text and illustrations provide a marvelous view of everyday shipboard life, with a documentary earnestness reminiscent of Lewis Hine. The book is also an artifact of a culture with values as far removed from our own – it now seems – as those of the ancient Greeks. Bed wetting was considered a form of malingering, as was feigned epilepsy…