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3. SOBRE O VESTUÁRIO

            DEAR PAULINE, – Your ideas regarding the hygiene of clothing appear to me to be so rudimentary that the best thing I can do will be, I think, to categorise for you methodically the different kinds of fabric chiefly employed in making garments, and their various properties, considered from a scientific point of view.

            Materials used for clothing are divisible, in the first place, into two groups, – those of vegetable origin, such as linen, hemp, cotton, and caoutchouc, and those of an animal nature, as wool, cashmere, furs, feathers, hides, and silk. Now, to all these materials belong certain physical characteristics – differing for each variety – which may be ranged under three distinct heads, i.e., calorific properties, texture, and colour.

            You ask me how you are to know what kind of stuff and what “make” is likeliest to prove most suitable for winter wear; why linen is often recommended to be worn next the skin in hot weather, merino in cold, and so on. Such questions can only be answered by putting you in possession of certain facts ascertained by science in regard to the qualities of the various dress fabrics in common use. Caloric, as no doubt you know, is the learned word for heat, and by the “calorific properties” of any material is meant simply its heat-producing

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qualities. The human body, the temperature of which is normally superior to that of the surrounding atmosphere, would lose a great part of its warmth were it not for the action of the clothing worn. This action is twofold; in the first place, garments act as a screen, by opposing themselves more or less to loss of heat by radiation from the surface of the skin; secondly and indirectly, by intercepting between themselves and the skin a layer of atmospheric air, which air, being a feebly conducting agent, diminishes still more the loss of bodily temperature. On the other hand, by inverse action, clothing prevents the overheating of the body by the solar rays and thus opposes the absorption of exterior heat. Vegetable stuffs, such as flax materials which include all varieties of linen, cambric, and batiste; cotton materials, such as calico, muslin, and so forth, conduct heat better than animal fabrics. The conducting power of wool, merino and silk is very small; that of furs, feathers, and down is still less, so that you see at once what is the answer to your question about wearing merino vests in cold weather. Merino, or indeed any kind of feebly conducting fabric, such as spun silk for instance, shuts in the heat of your body, and the warmth thus accumulates and remains in a fixed quantity; whereas when you wear linen, the radiation from the skin is much greater, and your temperature is correspondingly lowered.

            Moreover, according to the conducting, emitting, and absorbing power of different stuffs, the cutaneous transpiration of the body varies; feeble heat conductors, while accumulating the warmth of the skin augment its transpiration; strong heat conductors, on the contrary, diminish this transpiration. And here I must stop to remind you that transpiration is not necessarily liquid.

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Perspiration is simply the condensed state of the vapour of the cutaneous transpiration or exhalation. The skin is always breathing through its two or three million pores, and is thus continually discharging a considerable quantity of invisible vapour, so that were the whole body to be varnished in such a way as to prevent this evaporation, death would ensue. This once actually happened in the case of a child who had been gilded from head to foot in order to represent a golden cherub in a religious procession. The application of the gold-leaf closed the orifices of the skin, suppressed its transpiration, and the child died asphyxiated.

            Fabrics retain in their meshes, or at their surface, more or less of the moisture of the atmosphere. Usually those stuffs which retain the most are coolest, and consequently in certain seasons they expose the wearer to the action of chills and humidity, and should be carefully avoided by rheumatic persons. Science distinguishes between that part of the atmospheric moisture which impregnates the tissues without causing them to feel damp to the touch, or allowing itself to be squeezed out, and that part which is retained by capillary action, and which gives the fabric a moist feel, and can be wrung out of it. Linen materials are more apt to retain humidity than hempen stuffs, and these last than cotton. Cotton absorbs most moisture without becoming damp; flannel and woollen materials absorb most by capillarity, and therefore more readily assume a feeling of humidity; but as this humidity evaporates gradually, it does not determine any sudden chill.

            Again, woollen and silken stuffs, as well as furs, feathers, and caoutchouc, develop and retain electricity. Hemp, linen, and cotton are, on the contrary, good conductors of the electric fluid. A silk or merino jersey,

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worn next the skin, will often “crackle” audibly when removed from the body at night, especially if the weather be dry.

            The more air a fabric encloses in its meshes, the warmer it is, because, as I have already pointed out, air is a very poor conductor of caloric. Therefore, all loosely-made tissues, woven of thick, “fluffy” material, such as tricot, garments made of knitted wool or silk, or of mixed cotton and wool, are invariably warmer than close-made stuffs, not because in themselves they are warm, but because they imprison and retain in their interstices a considerable quantity of air. The same observation applies to the warmth of feathers and for trimmings, and of quilted linings, whether the padding employed be cotton wadding or down.

            A word may be useful here in regard to the value of fur clothing. Hides in their living and natural condition are permeable, and permit the system of the animals to which they belong to retain the normal temperature and healthy function of the various organs by means of free glandular action. But dead hides, stripped from the carcase, and having undergone an astringent and hardening process, called “tanning,” have lost their permeability, they no longer admit ventilation, and, if worn as clothing, they tend to repress transpiration, and to shut in beneath them the exhalations of the body, which, consequently, condense as perspiration on the surface of the skin, and render it clammy and unclean.

            A suggestion has recently been made that fur garments might be rendered more hygienic by perforating them here and there with small holes, so as to admit of the access of the air to the skin. But such an artifice would probably result in making the clothing draughty and

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chilly rather than hygienic; and it is, therefore, I think, better to eschew garments of hides altogether, or at least to wear fur only as trimming on cloth, plush or velvet material. Moreover, the fur trade, and especially that branch of it known as the seal fishery, involves very great cruelty, and this consideration ought not to pass for nothing with good women. There are few worse barbarities in the world than those which are perpetrated in the Arctic seas on the gentle and intelligent seal. It would wring your heart to read of these things, Pauline, and I am sure you would never wear a seal-skin again. When they first came to my knowledge, I had a seal dolman in my wardrobe, but I could never put it on afterwards; so I got rid of it at the first opportunity, and have never bought a strip of fur of any kind since. Nor have I suffered from the cold in consequence; for with woollen materials, soft, thick plush, so like fur, without its inconveniences, velveteen and feathers, I keep myself quite sufficiently covered in winter-time, and gain in the warmth of my garments what I lose in weight. For, among the inconveniences of fur must be reckoned the heaviness of the hide, and the fatigue it consequently causes to the wearer.

            Feathers are quite light, and, being sewn on to a permeable foundation of cloth or canvas, they are thoroughly hygienic clothing. Ostrich feathers, the prettiest and most effective of all, are obtained without cost of life or pain. The birds which furnish them are kept in large numbers at ostrich farms, and once a year their feathers are taken by clipping the quills at a short distance from the skin. If the quills were to be pulled out forcibly, the bird’s health would be injured, and the feathers might not grow again; therefore as the ostriches are reared and preserved for the sake of their plumage, the

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owners do not resort to this barbarity, but by avoiding the laceration of the birds, avoid also their untimely death and injury to their health.

            For bed-clothing in winter-time I think you will find knitted or woven wool coverlets preferable to duvets, which, being less pervious, often cause excessive perspiration and headache if spread over the body at night. For the same reason duvet petticoats and jackets for day-wear are objectionable. By the way, remember that if you want to be warm in bed, you must not heap all your coverings over it, but see that a thick Austerlitz blanket or tricot is placed under the lower sheet, between it and the mattress. Your spine needs warmth even more than your chest, and this must always be borne in mind, in making a bed as well as in dressing.

            Nor is the colour of garments a detail to be overlooked from the hygienic point of view. The celebrated Benjamin Franklin, having placed some scraps of cloth of similar texture and size, but of different colours, on a bank of snow, under a bright sun, found that of all of them a piece of black cloth sank deepest, and that white cloth did not sink at all. Hence he concluded that the black cloth had become hotter than the rest, while the white had remained cold, and, consequently, he assumed black bodies to be the best and white the worst absorbers of radiant heat. But his reasoning was incomplete, for the chemical constitution of colour has as much to do with the matter as colour in itself, and in some cases white radiates and absorbs far better than black. It will not therefore surprise you to find that scientific people are by no means agreed in opinion about the relation of colour to warmth. Stark and Coulier, who have made a special study of the subject, think that the influence of colour is not the same in regard to the radiation of heat

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from the body, and to the penetration of solar heat from without. They hold that black garments radiate the maximum of caloric, and that white ones best retain the heat of the body, protecting it equally well against the exterior temperature, so that such garments are always the best to wear, alike in hot and cold weather; for in hot weather they absorb less solar heat than black or coloured dresses, and in cold weather they retain better than these lost the animal warmth of the surface of the skin. Certain it is that in very severe latitudes, the fur and feathers of wild creatures are almost invariably white or silver grey. The Polar bear, the ermine, the Arctic fox and Siberian dog are examples. On the other hand, white flannel is usually found cooler than coloured by cricketers and boating men; and white cotton, muslin, and linen are worn for the same reason by the inhabitants of tropical countries. Other hygienists of repute – Rumfort and Home – hold a different opinion, and counsel the use of black garments in hot climates. For my part, I think that although in this respect, as in so many others, “doctors differ,” experience amply proves the superior coolness of white clothing and therefore decidedly endorse Professor Tyndall’s view that “black dresses are more potent than white ones as absorbers of solar heat” (Professor Tyndall’s lecture “On Radiant Heat,” delivered before the Royal Institution of Great Britain, January 19, 1866). In the Polar regions there is but little solar heat available, therefore Nature clothes the Arctic animals in white, in order to retain the bodily temperature and prevent a too rapid radiation. The same motive is applicable to the wearing by ourselves of white woollen apparel and furs in winter, when the sun’s rays have but scant power.

            I have a few words to add on the subject of colour and

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texture in relation to the absorption of miasmatic emanations and organic contagia. Black dresses are said to be less safe from this point of view than any other. Next in order comes blue, then green. Yellow absorbs very little, and white least of all. Animal tissues retain the minute floating germs of disease longer than vegetable fabrics, and harbour them more readily; contagia are longer preserved in wool and in silk than in cotton or linen. Consequently the light-coloured print dresses worn by hospital nurses are well chosen for their purpose, while the black cloth costumes of the doctors are, on the contrary, highly dangerous as a means of spreading infection. Hildebrand, in his remarkable work on contagion, says that a black coat which he had worn when visiting a patient suffering with scarlet fever, after having been laid aside for more than a year and a half, was taken by him into Podolia, and, on being put on there, immediately communicated the disease to himself, and spread it in the province in question, where, until then, scarlet fever had been almost unknown. Verbum sat sapienti.

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