BARE HEADS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 3, Issue 699, 27 November 1933, Page 7

BARE HEADS

MEDICAL AUTHORITIES CAUTIOUS ON QUESTION. The shedding of various articles of clothing is becoming more ,and more popular. Women have long ago shown that they at least can he comfortable in not quite enough to cover them, while men have struggled round in all weathers wearing far too much. Without going to the extreme which is so •far popular only in limited localities — jthey do not hesitate to discard stockings in public, and set the example of playing games in very abbreviated igarments. The boldest step that ordinary men have been able to take so far, as a regular practice, is to ahandon the hat; and a lxatless man will declare his firm liking for his bare-headedness. How does the medical profession regard the custom? asks a writer in the Melbourne Argus. An eminent French physician was credited with | having said some years ago that the ! discarding of hats led to over-heating 1 of the brain cells, and might easily I produce insanity. Such a disquieting view is not taken hy th'e medical profession in Anstralia, although a me,asure of caution is urged. Dr. Molesworth, a dematolo'gist, of Sydney, says that the head should not he exposed indiscriminately to the sun. Relatively the incidence of skin cancer in Australia is very high, and medical men are suspicious of the unfiltered rays of the sun. Th'e one who suffers chiefly in this way is the person with I little pigment in the skin— the youth who burns rather than browns. One doctor said recently that strong sunshine was bad for the Nordic type, but less injurious to the Mediterranean type. Dr. Connor, the acting-director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, said that, speaking purely from the iscalp point of view, the bare head had much to commend it. There was, he said, a theory some time ago th'at the I hat, interfering with the free circulation of hlood to the head, produced baldness. Hence to some extent the freedom of women and savages from bald heads. Hatters are frankly despondent. "We should be. selling half as many hats again as we are doing were it not for this fad," said a leading hatI ^er*