An old Indiana law declares mustaches illegal if the bearer habitually kisses other people. And in Texas it’s still against the law to dust public buildings with a feather duster. Weird, right?
Maybe. Maybe not.
Laws are often an effort to control what we fear. But what can be so fearful about a mustached man who likes to kiss and a feather duster, you ask?
Here’s a possible answer. Tuberculosis.
Sure, it’s not frightening to most of us today, but less than a hundred years ago tuberculosis was every bit as frightening as cancer. One statistic states that by the beginning of the 19th century, tuberculosis had killed 1 in 7 of all people who had ever lived. By the early 20th century, tuberculosis consistently ranked as one of the top three causes of death in the United States. Few families escaped its effect.
Up until the mid-1800s the medical field considered TB (or consumption as it was known then) a hereditary disease. If someone in your family died of consumption and you had a fragile disposition, chances were you’d get it too. Chalk it up to unlucky genes. But things shifted in 1882 when Robert Koch announced his discovery of the tubercle bacillus and initiated the germ theory of how diseases were spread. By the turn of the 20th century, scientists accepted that TB was spread from droplets of saliva from infected individuals.
Treatment of the infected patient changed as hundreds of TB sufferers were isolated into sanitariums. When scientists discovered the tuberculosis bacteria could survive up to six months in the dust of dark places, women’s hemlines were shortened and housekeepers were instructed to use damp cloths and mops rather than brooms and feather dusters to eliminate dust. When news spread that facial hair could harbor deadly germs, beards and mustaches gave way to clean-shaven faces. Spitting in public, once a very common practice, now became disgusting.
Suddenly, this weird law on the books in El Paso doesn’t seem so weird anymore, does it?
“Churches, hotels, halls of assembly, stores, markets, banking rooms, railroad depots, and saloons are required to provide spittoons of a kind and number to efficiently contain expectorations into them.”
And now you know.