THE BATH.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 48, 28 November 1891, Page 631

THE BATH.

first attention paid us when we enter this world and the last as life departs f rom us * sa bath. The unwashed body z conveys the last significance of indignity and -JL, forlornness. Ontside these two functions most mortals deal with water sparingly as possible—that is to say, they wash when they feel dirty, drink when they are parched, but are unconfessedly glad to escape the necessity of either. It is hard to tell what children hate most, learning a Sunday school lesson or taking the Saturday bath exacted of them. It takes as much cultivation to appreciate a bath as to enjoy a painting. A country lad will find interest in looking at Verestchagin’s war pictures, but their terrible eloquence is lost upon him. Curious that in an age when conveniences for bathing are common as street lights there is not the most distant need of warning devout souls against too great indulgence in the pleasures of the bath, as Holy Church in the middle ages found necessary. Bathing was allowed to the devout as sparingly as a prohibitionist would permit alcohol in collapse, and as many good reasons were alleged against the externa) use of water once as there are against the inward use of spirits to-day. (Ince upon a time a noble lady in retreat in one of the richest abbeys of France made up her mind to have a bath. It was objected to, with the admirable excuse that nothing existed in the house which would answer for a bath-tub. Nothing daunted, the lively dame seized upon a large coffer lined with metal, which would serve for her foot bath. She had it dragged to her room, filled with water from the kitchens, and took, let us hope, a partial bath, for alas ! it leaked. The water ran through floors and injured some fine painted ceilings beneath it. People then, as now, put taste before decency. I notice that public spirited persons, or those who mean to be such, are anxious to secure a classic pieturesqueness for the facade of the free baths which they design to inflict upon the public, while they overlook provisions indispensable for refinement and safety from contagion. Public gifts demand closer scrutiny than they are likely to receive, and none more than a public bath-house. The bath has a hundred benefits besides acting the part of washerwoman in laundering our garment of skin. It refreshes by change of temperature, for man is not at his best in air over 75 degrees or below zero. Very few people know, what the Russ and Finn are well aware of, that a hot bath in winter will so heat and stimulate the body as to enable it to bear cold better for days. Few understand the necessity for freely perspiring persons of two baths daily in hot weather, to clear the pores and cool the body, morning and night. Prostration by heat would be almost unknown if this were the habit of all classes, especially of working men who sweat copiously. The bath as a means of physical development is hardly known. A properly fitted bathroom is not second to a gymnasium for perfecting the body. People take their baths too much by theory. The rigid disciplinarian bathes in cold water the year round as a corporeal and spiritual benefit and a protest against weakness of the flesh. The nervous, conscientious woman endures it, hoping to harden and strengthen herself, dreading above all things making herself tender. The injudicious parent urges her shivering children into the cold tub or the more dreadful shock of the shower-bath, never dreaming of the mischief she does. To break the constitution of a susceptible child and lay the train for paralysis, hysteria and epilepsy nothing is surer than a course of hardening in early youth. If the cold bath or the shower is dreaded, if there is catching of the breath and tremor as the child enters the water, empty the bath of its cold flood and turn on the warm water till he is glad to get in and play in it. A mother would be alarmed if a child fully dressed took a chill from cold air, which lowers the bodily warmth far less than the morning chill of cold water she administers daily. If you want to give a girl a weak constitution by all means insist on the various systems of discomfort which excellent persons consider improving. A woman speaking of this sort of bringing up said that in looking back to her childhood she could hardly remember

ever being comfortable, as she was either made to wash in cold water or weighted with too much clothing when she went out of doors, forbidden to hover round the tire for fear of getting tender, and obliged to sleep in an icy chamber for the same reason, while diet and habits were regulated with an ingenious spirit of torture. Instead of hardening it undermined her constitution and left her one of the most susceptible of creatures. We can breathe and move in cold air, though that is ingeniously warmed before it reaches the skin and lungs, but I doubt if we were ever made to delight in cold water in cold weather. The coldest nations take the hottest baths, and are not enfeebled by them. It is blood heated by youth or the tire of full life which likes the cool dip or spray, but beware how you have to nerve yourself to endure it. A cold bath may be a risky experiment. The rule that cold bathing is safe when followed by good reaction is not wholly sound. A woman who used to take

baths of the coldest well water daily and find great refreshment from them, afterwards charged weakness of the heart and general debility to this excessive stimulus. A doctor says all the persons he has known who boasted of breaking a film of ice to take their baths died early, yet doubtless they felt good reaction at the time. It is doubtful if anygrown person, if allowed free choice, ever persisted in cold bathing which left a chill. It is safer to say, take a cold bath only when it is absolutely delicious in anticipation and actual enjoyment. If you would have vigorous, fair, healthy children make their baths a diversion, having the room and water kept so warm that they can play in it to their hearts’ content. Do not hurry them out of it, for water is a stimulus to growth and a tonic to muscles and nerves. Half an hour in a room heated to 80 degrees at the walls and free from draughts and cracks, with water not allowed to fall below 85 degrees

at any time, the children permitted to get in and out of the tub and run about, to spatter and frolic, is as good a system of physical development as you can devise for all under twelve years of age. One reads with envy Mr Lafarge's description of the Japanese habits, * a whole family—father, mother, children —filing down to the big bathroom at the corner, whose windows were open,’ where he ‘ heard them romp and splash and saw their naked arms shining through the steam.' A bathing garment for the elders would satisfy all the pro prieties, and we might have in our own houses the charm ing scenes French artists imagine from Greek, well-known by the photographs, where women and naked children lounge and frolic in the marble-lined, flower-decked pools of the spacious bathing rooms. Our public and private baths are much too business-like, and in dingy surroundings hardly more tempting than sculleries.