The Birmingham age-herald. [volume] (Birmingham, Ala.) 1902-1950, 1908-11-05
From the Washington Herald.


VIZ cured divorce from her hus-
band on the ground that he
has not taken a bath for II years, a
novel complaint which only goes to
strengthen the proof that divorce cases
are usually unclean. OF course, the Of
it had occurred anywhere else than in
Pittsburg. but it is hard to imagine
what must be the appearance of a man
living in that city of coal dust and
CRIME without taking a bath for II
years. 1t must, really, have been rather
hard for the mans wife to recognize
him. The original man, the man she
married IT years ago must have been
pretty well hidden under several lay
ers of adhesive Pittsburg atmosphere,
and she was quite right to decline to
live any longer with a stranger.
But the plight of this Pittsburg lady,
which the courts seem duly to have
recognized and to have relieved her
from brings up the whole question of
bathing. Even in this enligh tened age,
when in the best-regulated families the
porcelain bath tub is no longer used
as a receptacle for the winters coal
there is some doubt existing as to the
proper classification of the bath itself.
Is it a necessity, a habit, or just a
luxury?
The question will be answered, we
ina CINE, as suits the individual tenn
permanent tn Rough habit, of course, will
have something to do with it. We i'm .
agine that most of US started out in life
with a fair chance of acquiring the
bathing habit though, perhaps, 1t is
fortunate that few of us can carry our
minds back to that condition of abject
helplessness when the mother or the
nurse insisted on plunging us into
lukewarm water and stopping our un-
availaing protests with an excess of
soap, All of us had this experience.
Some of US have grown away from
it; others perhaps, to whom the taste
of infantile soap still clings as hated
memory. deliberately decline to battle
nowadays more often than necessary
go as to even things up, as 1t were.
Some doctors. and recently profess
sor in the University of Chicago de-
lare that the bath is not altogether
healthy; that 1t is creator OF COLDS
conducive to pneumonia and other dis
eases, There may be something in this
contention. for in the South Sea isles,
where the natives battle frequently in
the tepid water, they are pretty sick
ly lot, while up in the arctic, where
the gentle Eskimo has his fur clothes
sewed onto him and never takes bath,
health and freedom from pulmonary
troubles are Characteristic.
The whole subject is broad one. 1t
would nightly have interested Carlyle,
who might well have considered how
many of his famed heroes cared about
bathing, and who could have set off
against this fact the difference in courage
between the wel-bathed aristocrats of
the French revolution and the u1washed
sans culottes He would not have failed
to remember too, that had it not been
for that fatal bath, Charlotte Corday
could not so easily have worked her will
ON Marat. and such speculations more
surely would have led him TO a more in
NSSesJ
! on clothes.
Undoubtedly there are grave dangers
lurking in the bath. No one can ignore
these days that there are many germs
latent in the water, eagerly seeking what
humans they may devour; and, thinking
of these things, it requires some courage
| TO trust ones carcass to the tub Our
! friends, the Japanese, recognize this dan
| ger. and they are one of the best-bathed
| nations on earth. but they know, too
| that heat is destroyer Of the germs
| and so they put stove under their bath
| tubs and the bather and the water arc
| boiled together. 1t may be that the Brit
| Usher tries the other extreme, and hopes
| by his cold tub that the lurking germs
| are too shivery to get In their deadly
work.
| And that thought-that about the Brit
! isher-invites one other speculation. Why
| is it, one wonders. that those who pro-
noune it .barth" use the thing itself
much oftener than those who pronounce
| it nasally, "ba-a-ath?" But the subject