BACTERIA IN PUBLIC SWIMMING BATHS 
95 
ground. (2) That bathers who have the energy to swim in October, are probably in 
the habit of taking a cold bath every day throughout the year, and are constantly 
cleaner than the average. The practical inference is this ; assuming for the sake of 
argument that bacteria are undesirable occupants ot swimming baths, it is not necessary 
to change the water so frequently in cold weather as in hot weather, because each bather 
introduces less bacteria. 
While it is impossible to markedly diminish the number of bacteria carried into 
the bath without compelling each person to use soap before bathing, a question which 
will be referred to later, there is a frequent source of pollution which might easily be 
avoided, it is this : — Between the edge ot the bath and the dressing-boxes there runs 
a tiled corridor about four feet wide. Along this corridor, which is usually soaked 
with water, dripping from the bodies of the bathers, fully dressed persons are 
constantly walking and unconsciously washing the soles of their dirty boots. Thus 
in a short time the surface of the corridor is black with dirt carried in by the boots 
from the streets. Meanwhile, bathers are also walking along this corridor 
in their bare feet, and carrying the filth from it into the bath. The state of the corridor 
is worse in the evening, when every box is occupied, when persons are standing about 
waiting tor an empty one, and when the attendant is too busy to be constantly 
washing the dirt off its surface. We counted one night eighty people walking over a 
square yard of the corridor in their dirty boots in the space of forty minutes. Let 
anyone who doubts the truth of this statement go when the baths are full ; let him 
walk along the corridor in his bare feet, wipe his feet on a towel, and then examine 
the towel ; or let him wash his feet in clean water and then examine the water, and he 
will find it turbid, and containing fragments of straw, horse-hair, and other dirt 
derived from the streets. The sediment which had collected in the gutter at the side 
of the corridor of a first-class bath contained over 300,000,000 bacteria per c.c. 
The following experiment was performed to estimate approximately the number 
of bacteria which might be carried into the bath from the dirty corridor by the feet 
of the bather. A boy, after swimming about the bath, came out and stood on the 
corridor. We asked him to rinse his feet in 500 c.c. of water containing a known 
number of bacteria, and then calculated the number of bacteria introduced by the dirt 
0:1 his feet, and found that had he dived into the bath he would have carried in some 
80,000,000 organisms at least. This observation was repeated several times by one 
of us on his own feet, and it was found the number of bacteria deposited on the 
soles varied, according to circumstances, from thirty million to over a hundred million. 
When the water is still, this material deposits itself in patches at the bottom of 
the bath, and is often visible to the naked eye. This deposit has substantially the 
same composition as that obtained from the bathers' feet in the above experiment. 
We are convinced that a large amount of street dirt is needlessly carried into the 
bath by the feet of the bathers, especially in certain old-fashioned baths where the 
