A GILDED live pig is a sight rarely seen. The rarity of putting gold leaf all over a living animal of any kind comes from the fact that the animal dies so soon after the operation. It has been tried several times and always with the same result.
The idea arose from an experiment unfortunately performed upon a child on the accession of Leo X. to the papal chair. The child was gilded all over to represent the Golden Age. The people of Florence were delighted with the idea, but the death of the child took place so quickly that some thought the brief duration of the Golden Age was miraculously represented as well as its great glory.
The experiment has never been repeated upon a human subject, but men of science cautiously tried to find out the secret of the child's living but a few hours after the operation, and so gilded pigs and varnished rabbits and other small animals. From such tests of the value of an open skin to animal life they found that all things that have breath must have open skin pores in order to maintain life.
Closing the pores of the skin causes the temperature to fall directly and the heart and lungs become gorged with blood. The circulation of the blood is seriously interfered with and death follows with the usual symptoms of asphyxiation.
Strange as it seemed to those who first witnessed such experiments, the life of an animal is more directly dependent upon the action of the skin than upon that of the stomach, the liver, or even the brain. Monstrosities have been born without brains; but they have frequently lived for some time, taking their food regularly and having the appearance of as much comfort as others of their kind with brains. They died early, but their life was uniformly longer than the time which elapsed after the application of a coating which stopped the skin of other animals until death ensued.
A man will live much longer without stomach action than without the proper functions of the skin. In fact, the skin may take the place of the stomach in sustaining life for awhile, where the act of swallowing has been prevented by disease or accident. Feeding the patient through the skin has been accomplished with varying degrees of success. A bath of warm water or milk and water assuages thirst. Sailors deprived of fresh water wet their clothes with salt water, and the absorption of moisture sustains them where salt water taken into the stomach might have resulted fatally.
The health of the skin is closely connected with that of the whole system. Its appearance and condition as to moisture and dryness, as well as its temperature and color are regularly examined when the system is out of order. Since the skin is so important to the general health and its condition is placed so completely within our control, it is wise to care for it judiciously. We often find other organs of the body in an unsound condition and begin to doctor them when the whole trouble has arisen from bad treatment of the skin. The skin needs more care than the liver or the stomach, and many of the troubles laid at the door of one or both these organs may be avoided by proper care of the one organ over which we have entire control, the skin. Where the skin is prevented from doing its proper work other organs try to carry it on, and the result is that those organs which are really beyond our control, and which will work properly without any attention from us, become diseased by our bad treatment of the organ that comes first in the natural order of attention.
The skin throws off waste matter from the system. Two and one-half pounds of watery vapor is poured out daily from the average man. A clogged skin retains certain salts in the system supposed to have something to do with such diseases as rheumatism and gout if left in the blood by too little exercise of perspiration.
Besides the sweat glands there are glands which exude fatty substances upon the skin, keeping it suitably lubricated and somewhat impervious to water. In some animals this secretion is so abundant that the skin cannot become wet in swimming. Beneath the skin are frequently cushions of fat to protect the soles of the feet and the outside of the larger joints. The blubber of the whale, the thickest skinned of all animals, is of this sort, and is evidently intended to make his tremendous weight less destructive when brought in contact with other objects. The hide of the swifter ones is peculiarly fitted with large papillæ of feeling which are supposed to warn them of the presence of rocks and other objects by the action of the water while swimming near them.