Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1921-10-18
SIC Transit Gloria Tubb;!

| ~ CHEMISTS who cond mn the bath
| tub are but reviving on new ground
/ complaints that waXed potent in the
md-Nneteenth century, when that ablution-
airy innovation was thrust before dunn
founded world. Physicians of the eighteen
| fortes and fifties did not protest against the
| bathtub, do of today, the germ
theory, for this subtle doctrine was not then
afeld, Pasteur himself being in the dawn of
his epo.hal discoveries. Their objection was
to the stark danger, as they saw 1t, of ex-
cessive washing. History avouches that the
Philadelphia Common Council seriously con-
sidered outright prohibition of bathing be-
tween the sere leaf of November and the raw
and gustys' days of March, a resolution to that
effect lacking but two votes of passage.
When Master David Copperfield, after his
dusty adventures, arrived at Aunt Betsy Trot-
woods, bedraggled and forlocn, that pr1m
lady summoned the laconic Mr.. Dick and ask
ed in despair What SHALL do with him?"
Mr. Dick stared upon the little boy for some
five or ten minutes, and then burst out with,
WASH him!" That our grandsires of seven
ty-odd years ago heartily approved and prac-
ticed that advice within what then seemed
reasonable bounds and forms scarce need be
said; but to legions the idea of plunging one
self into tub OF cold water on frosty morn
ing was the very opprobrium of good sense
and hygiene The sprucest contemporaries
of Josh Billings naively dis tinguished between
bathing, which was a daily doing with bowl
and pitcher, and that solemn rite of Saturday
bedtimes, bathing ''all over Those were
the days or, exactly speaking, the nights
of the foot-tub, when unattired humanity,
half-shivering, half-blistering before the open
fire, piled soap and cloth in heroic proof that
cleanliness is next to Goodness. Nor it
be doubted that the germs, if germs there
were in those arcadian times, fled appalled,
and stricken in the ordeal.
Naturally, generation SO Justify scrubbed
looked with mingled suspicion and contempt
on the puffed-up Ohio invention Of 1S42-the
"BAWTH-tub" as immaculate but conserva-
tive persons sarcastically pronounced it.
Swimming pools, or as they said in Georgia,
"swimmin' holes were duly esteemed by
those hardy sons Of virile age, who recalled,
belize, that the old Roman Seneca used to
wash in spring on the wintriest mornings.
But a bath-TUB-ugh! Bostonians of the
stricter sect regarded it, if not as a device
straight from Satan, at least as what the New
England Synod of 1879 had termed "a de-
clens1on from the primitive foundation work.
Of the Puritan fathers; and they succeeded In
getting upon the statute books, albeit not act
ually into enforcement, a law, which stood
unrepealed until 1862, declaring it illegal to
battle in a tub. Even the Old Dominion, with
her aristocratic good-humor and tolerant to-
SSuIlys lupOSSu d lax Oh thirty collars
a year on every bathtub within her bounds.
But fashion wins a way where seraphs
would despair In Washington in the au-
tumn of 1850, it was first cautiously whisper
ed and then openly gossiped that bathtub
had been Installed in the White House. Now,
President Fillmore was neither radical nor
an epicurean. Would he, bone of the repub-
fc'sa bone, sanction the bathtub If it were in
deed the I'M american, unhygienic, and alto
gether unbecoming "contrsption" it's critics
fn Sn + $1N1 - 3~
Of popular thought, until at length the we'll
TODD from Gotham to Savannah would con-
trive to let it be known in the course of con-
yersation that THEY were having batttubs
installed. But how does the whirligig of time
bring in revenges! Back to condemnation the
tub now must go if the scientists have their
way, as they usually do in the end A germ
collector" they call it; the showers the only
effective bath. Sic transit! Already we can
hear the vassals of fashion shouting, 1.-THE
tub is dead! Long live the showari"