The Waterbury Democrat., 1934-07-16
LET'S HAVE A GOOD SWEAT

LET'S HAVE A GOOD SWEAT
 Now, children, please put your little physiology books away with your Mother Goose and Grimm's Fairy Tales, for that's where school textbooks purporting to deal with physiology belong. Today we're go- ing to have nice big sweat. First we ought to find out what sweat consists of, don't you think! And why we sweat and how your dog contrives to keep SO we'll and feel so good although he never sweats at all, except a wee bit on the pads of his feet.
 Many of you children are almost as familiar with the da Vinci legend as you are with Little Red Ridinghood. For those of you who are not brought up on fairy tales we may explain briefly that accord ing to the funny yarn number or children were gilded for some show, and they began to collapse and some died, but the versatile Leonardo stepped in and quickly washed off the gilt or paint with spirits and thus saved some of the children from death by suffocation or standardization or something.
 The best answer to this old wife's tale. children. is this. Rabbits do not sweat at all-they have no sweat glands; and yet if you cover more than one-fourth of the sur face of a rabbits body with an inn permeable coating such as paint or varnish the animal will die in a very short time, unless you keep the poor creature warm by artifi- cial means. If you keep the ani- malls temperature about normal by means of warm covering or a hot water bottle, there will be no i'll effect at all.
 The harm in such impermeable covering of the skin is therefore not due to suppression of sweat or to any influence on imaginary breathing" by the skin, but sole ly to loss of body heat, which is too rapidly dissipated from the vanished surface. Before death from such cause the body tempera- ture falls far below the normal. Warm -blooded animals cannot sur vive when more than half the body surface is painted, unless they are kept artifically warm.
 Recently some fan dancer or stage venus whose body had been painted with some dye or color suf- fered poisoning. A lot of little boys and girls jumped at this incl dent as evidence in support of the fancy that the skin breathes or that the sweat carries harmful poisons or toxic" waste matter from the body. Whatever poison- ing occurred in that case, or in any case where the material is applied to the surface of the body, is due to inhalation of some of the poison through the lungs. No one has as yet found any good evidence to d-si pute this fact.
 The sweat-perspiration to you. prude-consists of nothing else but salt and water, practically. Traces of a dozen other substances are found in the sweat. but PHYSI- OLOGICALLY. my dear children, you may take it as undebatable that the only purpose of sweating in any circumstance is to keep the body cool, and nothing of any importance is eliminated, thrown off, excreted or carried out in or but the sweat, in health or disease. save salt and water.
 Not that sweating isn't a good thing. in health and sometimes in disease. but want to give you lit- tie dears the straight out and the low down about 1t, so you won't be such easy marks for the char latans who promiset sweat your sins and ailments out of you.