Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 154, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 July 1918 — Bathing Is a Luxury, Not a Necessity, According to Arctic Explorer’s Theory [ARTICLE]

Bathing Is a Luxury, Not a Necessity, According to Arctic Explorer’s Theory

It is not essential to one’ health that one bathe frequently, according to the hypothesis expounded by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the arctic explorer, in a philosophical discussion of scurvy in the Medical Review of Reviews. Mr. Stefansson asserts bathing is purely an esthetic principle'' and that the value of cleanliness to health has not been established by the medical practitioners. Mr. Stefansson’s pronouncement will be greeted with jubilation by the elements which possess an ingrown dislike for hydrogen and oxygen in proportions of two to one. It has been accepted as dogmatic by the Mexican pelados for years, who as a religious function, bathe only on St day, which is celebrated early in May. “Much of what the ordinary practitioner tells you about ‘bathing for health’ is either not yet demonstrated as true or else is demonstrably untrue,” declares Mr. Stefansson. “The fact is that according to the point of view, cleanliness is a matter of esthetics or else of taboo observance rather than of health.” The explorer makes an apology in the article for his attack on medical orthodoxy by declaring he has been divorced from medical books and journals- for more than ten years. Mr. Stefansson wrote the treatise while in the arctic region in 1916. He. was reported as dangerously ill from typhoid fever on Herschel island.