There was a huge kissing phobia in the early 1900s and it was recommended to use lemons and an antiseptic kissing screen if there was no other way to avoid kissing the person you lusted.
The kissing screen is shown in the photograph, along with the article about avoiding men with facial hair.
Why You Ought to Kiss Only a Clean-Shaven Man
Should a girl kiss a clean-shaven or a whiskered man, if any?
This very delicate yet vitally important question has been answered scientifically and definitely by a distinguished Professor of the Paris Academy of Medicine.
His experiment proves that it is just one hundred times as dangerous from a pathological point of view to kiss a mustached or whiskered man as a clean-shaven one.
Professor Durand decided that this question, which has been much discussed in a loose way, ought to be settled scientifically. He secured the services of a young and healthy woman, who was willing to submit to the experiment for the sake of science, and a couple of doctors of his staff.
The young woman was first thoroughly sterilized. All the billions and billions of germs that lurked in her lips, eyes, hair and other external parts of her organism were completely destroyed. She was then locked up in a germ proof room, in the professor’s laboratory, used in bacteriological experiments. Elaborate precautions were taken to guard the feminine culture medium against contamination during the absence of the professor.
Of the two doctors, one was clean-shaven while the other wore the round, fuzzy beard and mustache which have become traditional among French medical men. The professor took his two assistants out for a walk among the microbes and bacteria of Paris.
He took them for a walk along the grand boulevards, the resort of the gayest Parisian butterflies of both sexes. He led them through a great department store near the Louvre, which was filled with women representing every class of Parisian society. Then he took them through the Louvre itself, which happened to contain at the moment a fine assortment of artists.
He steered them through Halles Centrales, the markets which feed practically the whole of Paris. He allowed them to jostle a crowd of factory girls coming out for lunch.
Finally he led them back, microbe laden, to his laboratory. First, he ordered the clean-shaven doctor to go in and kiss the culture medium (the woman) firmly and closely for two minutes. The professor held his stopwatch to see that the period was not exceeded. When the kissing had been completed, the professor brushed off the young culture medium’s lips and allow the invisible flora that hung there to drop into a Petri dish designed to hold microbes. Then he thoroughly sterilized the culture medium’s lips.
Now it was the turn of the whiskered doctor. He was ordered to go in and kiss the sterilized subject in the same manner for the same period as the other man. Once more, the professor brushed off the culture medium’s lips and collected the bacterial harvest in a second Petri dish.
Then the professor made a careful study of the two dishes. He estimated that the space kissed amounted to two square inches. From the dish used to collect the offspring of the clean-shaven man’s kiss, he counted 80,000 microbes, which is practically nothing, when we consider the enormous prevalence of microbes in our common surroundings. The few dangerous microbes among them were present in such small quantities that they would hardly have hurt anyone.
Next he examined the crop collected after the whiskered man’s kiss. In this he found upwards of 80,000,000 microbes of all kinds, or about one hundred times as much as the clean-shaven man’s kiss yielded. Among them were about 20,000,000 germs of tuberculosis, 10,000,000 germs of Typhoid, 5,000,000 germs of diphtheria, 1,000,000 germs of whooping cough, 1,000,000 germs of measles and 500,000 germs of scarlet fever.
It is well recognized that a heavy load of bacterial infection is usually needed to convey a disease. The infection of the whiskered man’s disease was dangerous to a point that under predisposing conditions would be likely to result fatally.
The clean-shaven man’s kiss, on the other hand, was so lightly charged with infection that it was practically innocuous.
The bacterial crop from the whiskered man’s kiss, after it had been allowed to grow for four days in a highly nutritious culture medium had increased to a mass of deadly germs, which if let loose might have destroyed the entire population of Paris.
The result of cultivating the bacterial crop from the clean-shaven man’s kiss was very different. From the starting point the harmless microbes predominated so greatly over the harmful ones that during the process of intensive cultivation they entirely crowded the deadly ones out of existence.
Source: Omaha daily bee. 28 April 1912.
