BEWARE WET FEET!

Dunstan Times, Issue 3141, 30 October 1922, Page 8

BEWARE WET FEET!

(By "Harley'Street.") Our grandmothers feared "wet feet" as we, perhaps, fear nothing on earth. During the last few years it has been the habit to laugh at their "notions" and abandon all their safeguards. The modern holiday-maker thinks that he, or she, knows better. That, however, is very doubtful, for, just recently, some experiments conducted in a very modern laboratory have suggested that to raise the temperature of the body it is only necessary to put the feet in warm water. It naturally follows that cold water must have the opposite effect. Putting and keeping the feet in it will lower the bodily temperature. Wet feet, it is true, are not always cold feet, but very often they become cold, and then the owner of them is apt to shiver.

And this, if it happens ,is a dangerous condition. A shiver is a symptom meaning that the surface of the body is empty of blood. The blood has gone deep. When that occurs our enemies, the germs of disease, are exceedingly apt to penetrate the citadel of health. Our grandmothers, •it is true, knew nothing at all of this. But they followed a sound and scientific instinct. They did not, if they could avoid it, risk a shiver.

Many of us are alive to-day because of the precautions they took. We ought to acknowledge that debt, and repay it by care, instead of, as too often occure nowadays, by carelessness.

The holiday season is the danger season in this respect, because it is not always easy to obtain dry socks and shoes while away from home. Hut this can be no excuse for not removing wet socks and shoes. A bare loot soon warms itself. Indeed, in wet weather, children are much safer without shoes and socks than with them—a fact not difficult to understand when we remember that the wet boot grows sodden while the bare foot is dried in an instant.