PICTURES THAT KILLED.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 10638, 14 April 1906, Page 1 (Supplement)

PICTURES THAT KILLED.

HOW WALL PAINTINGS MAY IN-

FLUENCE HEALTH

Pittsburg, tho homo of the Carnegie Steel Works, has a hospital which has the privilege of being under the direction of persons possessed by an enthusiasm for art. Such a belief had they in the beneficial power of art that they thought it would cure the sick.

They therefore got artists to paint pictures on the whitewashed walls. Instead of getting well, all the patients who were exposed to the influence of art became worse, and some of them died.

The doctors— prosaic vandals that they are — held a consultation, and decided that the art cure was a disastrous failure, and that the pictures must be effaced. This truly pathetic little story is told by the British Medical Journal, which in discussing the issue raised, suggests that, despite the tragedy of the Pittsburg hospital art may yet play an important part as an aid to sanitation. Certain colors, we are told, have been shown to have microbicide properties, and a series of experiments made by famous medical scientists of the past are described.

Among these were Dr. Beaufils, of Paris, who recently performed a series of experiments for the purpose of determining the action of colors on bacilli. He found that the effects of paints varied according to their colors. Ultramarine blue, for example, neutralised in twenty-four hours the effect of the pyocyanic bacillus, and after nine days this microbe became inert. The grey paint was negative-in its effects, and the maroon gave results only at the end of fourteen days. "While it would doubtless be rash to dispense with other processes of disinfection and trust entirely to colours, the investigation to which reference has been made supply an additional argument for doing away with wall papers,, which are as insanitary as they are often unsightly, and painting our walls," says the writer, lo sanguine minds the experments may even seem to justify the hope that a time may come when we shall find sanitary salvation in frescoes, and when beauty and health will be combined in the dwelling, in a manner_..undreamt of by the president of the Royal Society of British Artists."