Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/211

Rh were best informed, after all, in the matter of color of dress, for health as well as for service.

Fashion, in these later times, has misled once more, by the introduction of the incorrigible black clothing for the outer suit of men and women. The inconvenience of this selection reaches its height in the infliction it imposes on those poor ladies who, after bereavement, think it necessary to clothe themselves in unwholesome folds of inky crape. Next to the suttee, this seems to me the most painful of miseries inflicted on the miserable. Happily, it is, I think, beginning to see its last days.

V. I would make, in one or two sentences, an observation on the coloring substances that are sometimes introduced into dress, in their relation to health. When the aniline color stuffs were brought in for dyeing under-garments of red or yellow color, the-dyes caused, sometimes, where they came into contact with the skin, a local irritation, and now and then even some constitutional derangement. The agents which were at work to produce these conditions were the poisonous dyes called red and yellow coralline. The local action of both these poisons is sharp, and they bring upon the skin a raised eruption of minute round pimples, which I have known to be mistaken for the eruption of measles by the unskilled in diagnosis. The irritation which attends the rash is painful, and if there be much rubbing of the part little vesicles may form and give out a watery discharge. Once I knew an eruption on the chest, caused by a red woolen comforter, attended with much nervous prostration; but, as a rule, the evil is purely local, the coloring matter being not readily absorbed by the skin. This is fortunate, for the poison would be intense if it were to enter the blood.

It is necessary at once to remove the colored garment when it is causing the local mischief, and such garments should never be worn until they have been many times rinsed in boiling water.

VI. Cleanliness in dress, the last passage in my programme, is one on which, to an educated audience, I need not dwell. Health will not be clad in dirty raiment, and those who think it can be will soon find themselves subjected to various minor ailments—oppression, dullness, headache, nausea—which in themselves and singly seem of little moment, but which affect materially the standard of perfect health by which life is blithely and usefully manifested. The want now most felt among the educated, in our large centers, is the means for getting a due supply of well-washed clean clothes. The laundry is still up a tree, and, when you climb to it, it is rarely found worth the labor of the ascent. In London, at this moment, a thousand public laundries are wanted, before that cleanliness which is next to godliness can ever be recognized by the apostles of health who feel that their mission in the world stands second only on the list of goodly and godly labors for mankind.—Gentleman's Magazine.