REASONS FOR A DAILY BATH.
MANY persons do not consider a daily bath necessary, but take one perhaps once a week. They like to begin the week clean and with clean clothes. This is certainly better than not to bathe, but is it sufficient?—It is not. Except in those few cases of idiosyncrasy where bathing seems to do harm, a bath should be taken every day, and it should be short, but thorough. The reason will be seen at the close. The skin is an excrementitious organ, the same as the kidneys are. That it has other work to do is also true. It is an organ of touch; to a slight extent it is an organ of respiration, and it also acts as a protection to the tissues below it; but it is chiefly a gland spread over the whole surface of the body, and as a gland, or a multitude of small ones, it separates from the blood that broken-down waste matter, which, if retained, would quickly poison us to death. If the surface of the body be covered with an impermeable coating to prevent perspiration, life becomes extinct in a very short time. Krause, an eminent authority, estimated the number of these glands on the entire skin, and found on the forehead 1,258 to the square inch; on the cheeks, 548; on the front and sides of the neck, 1,303; on the breast and abdomen, 1,136; on the back of the neck and nates, 417; on the forearm, inner surface, 1,123; outer surface, 1,093; palm of hand, 2,736; back of hand, 1,490; upper part of thigh, inner surface, 576; outer surface, 2,685; dorsal12surface, 924; bottom of foot, 2,685; upper surface of foot, 924. Taking the surface of an average-sized man as a basis for calculation, he estimated that there were in the skin of the whole body 2,381,248 sweat glands. These glands are situated in the deep layer of the skin, and each one empties onto the surface by a little coiled tube. The sweat is secreted by them just as other glands secrete other substances, in a liquid form, but as it passes through the coiled tube that ends on the surface of the body, it becomes, in ordinary conditions, a vapor, and if the body were naked, it would fly away in the air at once. We call this vapor “insensible perspiration.” Much of it passes into our clothing and goes through it into the air. Some of the solids in it condense, and remain in our garments, and if worn even a few hours in hot weather, they smell foul and bad from the condensed sweat. It is the watery part, the least poisonous, that passes entirely off. Some of it condenses on the skin and blocks up, more or less, the mouths of the sweat ducts. In warm weather and during hard work the perspiration comes out, not as a vapor, but as a fluid, and collects on the skin in the form of sweat drops, often running down in streams. The amount of the sweat daily poured out on the skin varies with the food, temperature, and exercise, and ranges from two pounds to several pounds. In men who work as firemen for furnaces it will be perhaps eight or ten pounds daily. In a Turkish bath it sometimes amounts to as much. When the air is moist, it does not take up this perspiration so quickly as when dry, and we feel oppressed by it. For this reason a dry atmosphere is most healthful for many diseases. It enables the perspiration to escape quickly, which is a great relief to the body. The nature of the perspiration varies with the food, the health, and other conditions. In a gross feeder it is gross. In one who eats pure food it is less gross. About 995 parts in 1,000, are water; the remaining 5 parts are urea, fatty matter, volatile oils, alkaline salts, chloride of sodium, alkaline sulphates, phosphates, acids, ptomaines, etc. In addition we have glands in the armpits that secrete oily matter of a more or less offensive nature. From this it may be seen that the perspiration is an excretion the same as that from the kidneys, though not quite so richly loaded with broken-down tissues, but it is constantly poured out on the surface of our bodies, and makes this organ unclean. It is for this reason, the purification of the skin, that a daily bath is necessary. There are other reasons for bathing, but this is the chief one. The others will be considered in future articles.—Journal of Hygiene.