Rural Hygiene

The country childhood of rosy-cheeked children and ox-strong adults has another face: winter funerals, too few children reaching maturity, and men and women worn out in middle age. Is farm life really the spring of health it is supposed to be?

Writing in the early twentieth century, civil engineer and professor Henry N. Ogden turns to the health of rural communities, beginning with a deceptively simple measure: the death rate. His figures suggest that country life may be healthier than city life—but the gap can shrink to almost nothing, and incomplete records may make rural communities look safer than they are. Behind each average lie local conditions, public-health oversight, and lives cut short or diminished by disease. If the countryside’s reputation rests on numbers that hide as much as they reveal, what do those numbers truly say about rural health?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.