Details about The Joy of Sweat by Sarah Everts
The Joy of Sweat by Sarah Everts ePub PDF free download – In the summer of 1996, a woman walked into the dermatology office at Tygerberg Hospital in suburban Cape Town with an unusual complaint: Her sweat was red. She was understandably alarmed. But the medical team? They were intrigued. “It was fantastically interesting,” says Corena de Beer, a scientist who analyzed the case. “We spent months trying to figure out what was happening. Here was a healthy person, a nurse, in her twenties. The moment she started sweating, pink spots would appear on her white uniform.” By the end of a shift, the nurse’s underwear and uniform were sometimes bright red, particularly around the collar, back, and armpits. “Every night she soaked her stained clothes for 2 to 3 hours before washing them just to get the color out,” de Beer says. “Not only was it very disconcerting to have something so abnormal happening to her body, but the nurse was also concerned about her job. In a hospital, nurse uniforms need to be white. She felt the red sweat was socially and professionally unacceptable.”
Dermatologists see all manner of skin curiosities, but red sweat is so unusual that de Beer and dermatologist Jacques Cilliers published a scientific paper about it: “The Case of the Red Lingerie—Chromhidrosis Revisited.” Chromhidrosis is the medical term for colored (chrom) sweat (hidrosis). This nurse, it turns out, was not the first person to produce pigmented perspiration, nor would she be the last. The medical literature features many reports of sweat that has turned green, blue, yellow, brown, or red, with causes as varied as rare genetic conditions and workplace chemical exposure.