PUBLIC HEALTH OF THE SKIN. 351 



until they form one, true to itself, offers a sympathetic plane on 

 which the health and disease of the community also tend to universal 

 oneness or diffusion. There is no breach of continuity on the sur- 

 face of mankind, but the skin of the poor joins to that of the rich, 

 and epidemics run without ceremony from the one to the other; only 

 more sparse as they spot the palaces, because cleanness is more 

 studied there. 



After the stomach has taken care of our nourishment, and the 

 lungs have looked to our breath, the skin has to provide for both in 

 a kind of infinitesimal sense. For it supplies us with food, and dis- 

 burdens us of excretions; though both its aliments and rejections 

 are for the most part invisible : it also washes itself in air, and keeps 

 itself in motion ; the former, by itself; the latter, under the super- 

 intendence of the lungs. The skin is the theatre of influences; the 

 other organs we have mentioned deal with more palpable stuff. There 

 is a corresponding delicacy in the question of the public and private 

 health of the skin. 



Great, however, is the plainness, and equally great the mystery 

 of cleanliness. It is one of those terms that will hardly be chained 

 to a physical sense ; we no sooner begin to treat it, than it buds like 

 Aaron's rod, and blossoms into morals. Frequent ablutions wash 

 away the sordes of our bodies, open our pores, enable us to emanate 

 with freedom, and with freedom to take in what the atmosphere can 

 yield us. The model and mirror of these effects is presented in 

 our daily washings, which make us feel clean* This clean feeling 



* In speaking of the saliva we took occasion to say a few words on the emo- 

 tional nature of the secretions and excretions (pp. 152 — 154). The field is a wide 

 one, and embraces all the living processes. Feelings are changing in our bodies 

 with every transport of the animated fluids from place to place. The current of 

 blood above is the signal of one set of feelings, and its rush below produces an- 

 other; for it carries soul with it, and its sentiments are according to the parts 

 from and to which it is sent. The same is the case with the perspirations ; they 

 carry away old feelings, the perspirations of the soul, and remove them from the 

 person. So also do the dejections of a grosser kind. Hence the exhilaration con- 

 sequent upon the latter functions when satisfactorily performed. In washing, 

 especially, an effect is produced which we may term material-psychical, and which 

 everyone must have experienced ; a sentiment of new vigor, as though the mind 

 itself were washed in the skin. We do not know " how we are" in the mornings, 

 or what is the promised complexion of our day, until our ablutions have taken 



