St. Jerome didn't have a bath for forty years. Queen Isabella, of Spain, who supplied Columbus with the men and means that led to the "discovery" of America, was given a bath the day she was born, another on her wedding day and a third after death, when she was prepared for burial. A famous English prelate never bathed and never changed his clothes. New robes were put over the old ones which were allowed to rot and fall off. Wherever he went, worms, maggots and vermin fell from his robes. There are records of men being tired in court and accused if heresy or infidelity for having bathed.
>>18419008Buckle's History of Civilization says:>Bathing, being pleasant as well as wholesome, was a particularly grievous offense; and no man could be allowed to swim on Sunday. It was, in fact, doubtful whether swimming was lawful for a Christian at any time, even on week-days, and it was certain that God had on one occasion shown his disapproval by taking the life of a boy while he indulged in that carnal vice. As bathing was a heathenish custom, all public baths were to be destroyed (by order of the Spanish clergy), and even all baths in private houses.
>>18419009In the early part of the 19th century bathtubs and washstands were unknown in Europe. There were no washing facilities at the court of Catherine de Medici so that the seat of the court was changed ninty times in the course of six years so that the filthy rooms could once more be habitable. There were three thousand rooms in the palace of the Spanish kings, the Escorial , but not a single bathroom. There was no bathroom in the palace of the sun king at Versailles. A bath tub presented to the king was placed in the park and converted into a fountain because there was no one to use it.
>>18419012Only at irregular intervals did people of the period cleanse themselves. For the most part they perfumed themselves several times daily instead of bathing. Only decades later did men began to bathe themselves again and John Wesley dared to proclaim that" cleanliness is next to Godliness." There is a vast difference between this doctrine announced by Wesley and the proceeding one, that filthiness is next to Godliness which allowed St.Patrick to acquire sainthood merely by becoming the filthiest man in Ireland.
>>18419014In this respect Benjamin Franklin was a man ahead of his time; he imported a bath tub from France in 1778. This caused quite a stir among his acquaintances, but did not dent the social ostracism of bathing. Forty years later, during the presidency of James Monroe, a White House scandal was created when he said simply that he was going to take a bath. He went into another room and took a bath in a tub for which he paid twenty dollars. His political advisers screamed to high heaven about this indecency of his. There was a rumor that later, Andrew Jackson threw out Monroe's bath tub. At any rate, in 1873 the Commissioner of Public Health Buildings called attention to the unsanitary condition of the President's home, and mentioned it's lack of bathrooms. In 1849 a " public Bathing and Washing Association" was established in New York for the purpose of supplying bathing facilities for the people of New York City. There were few baths at the time.
>>18419015It is amusing to recall medical opposition to the use of the bathtub, as amusing as their violent opposition to railways and rapid travel thereon. Just as they declared rapid travel would be extremely dangerous to the public health and advocated building a wall ten feet high on each side of the track; so, when the bathtub was introduced into America, the medical profession denounced it as an "obnoxious toy from England," and passed resolutions and called on the government to prohibit its use because it would bring on "phyhisis, rheumatic fever, inflammation of the lungs and a whole category of zymotic diseases."
>>18419016Some of the conquistadors thought the reason the Aztec and other Mesoamericans kept dying from smallpox was because they bathed too muchAnd Spain literally banned bathing in Mexico by the natives
>>18419019The Phoenicians were preparing soap from goat tallow and wood ashes in 600BC (they used it to barter with the Gauls), and the Celts produced something similar, which they called "saipo" (so much for the Mount Sapo theory). But none of these people realised that they could use the stuff for washing. Until the 2nd century AD, soap was used either as a treatment for skin conditions or as a sort of hair gel. With the decline of the Pax Romana, Europe almost forgot about soap. In 1672, a German sending a box of Italian soap to a Lady von Schleinitz felt it prudent to enclose a set of instructions as to its use.
>>18419020The saxons even had to slaugther the danes because they were bathing too much.
>>18419022Frequent baths were recognized as a main condition of physical welfare, and perhaps for that very reason were neglected by the bigots of an antinatural creed. The self-torturing monks gloried in filth, and Llorente, in his "History of the Inquisition," mentions numerous instances of converts from Mohammedanism incurring suspicion by continuing to practise the daily ablutions of their former faith. One ex-Morisco, a citizen of Cadiz, had a quarrel with a servant-girl, and soon after was arrested and jailed on a charge of apostasy. After being four times arraigned and as often scourged within an inch of his life, he was at last, confronted with his accuser. In her thirst for revenge, the slander-monging slut had denounced him as a backslider and supported her insinuations with the assertion that her former employer was in the habit of locking himself up and taking a bath thrice a week. By sacrificing half his fortune and summoning a dozen medical witnesses, the defendant escaped the stake on a plea of physical necessity; his duties as manager of a woolen mill, he proved, obliged him to avoid cutaneous troubles by extra sanitary precautions, which he otherwise abhorred as practices of benighted misbelievers.
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>>18419027St Anthony also never bathed, the founder of monasticism. And surely many other saints, because hygiene is a heathen custom.
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>>18419008Meanwhile average people in the countryside bathed when they felt like it and considered all of that to be crazy.
>>18419037As discussed above, several Morisco offenses were related directly to Christian ideas regarding Moorish cleanliness and ritual bathing in order to prepare for communal prayers. The belief was that any signs of cleanliness or bathing before or after Friday could be construed as related to Friday prayers and a sign of guilt.Iberian bathing habits changed in the sixteenth century, in the wake of expulsions, conversions, and inquisitions, as bathhouses were increasingly suspected of being sites for sexual vice and vicarious Islamic practice. Thus, in contrast to their relatively clean medieval predecessors, Old and New Christians in early modern Spain no longer bathed regularlyMost Morisco memories included some awareness that they lived in a very different world from the Muslims who had earlier ruled much of the Iberian Peninsula. No longer holding dominant political power, Moriscos had to abandon or hide traditional costumes and bathing vessels, writings and musical instruments. Nevertheless, they saw all around them buildings and monuments that reminded them of past glories, a golden past when Muslim rulers lived in sumptuous palaces and muezzins called the faithful to prayer from high minarets.From then on, Spain would not tolerate the presence of unconverted Moors in its territory. Bathing, cleanliness, dietary choices, the use of henna, fasting during Ramadan, and the possession of books in Arabic, as well as what was called fautorship, or the favoring or defending of heretics by Christians (butchers and midwives were considered examples of fautors), became prosecutable crimes. The list of Morisco illegal activity kept mounting
>>18419040Notice how only former ottoman colonies are clean
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>>18419045Some people in the past were just insane, and stories like this are the r/wtf of the past.
On the topic of medieval hygiene, microhistorical accounts often mention nitpicking, that is, the practice of picking lice and nits (the eggs) out of the hair, much like monkeys do. Women in particular would spend a lot of time each day talking while nitpicking each others, sort of like how they spend hours at the hairdresser nowadays.It also goes without saying that eating the lice/nits was common, or at the very least crushing them between one's teeth before spitting them out, but most people didn't bother with the spitting, especially since protein was kind of a luxury.
>>18419057"Eat ze bugs" is trad.
>>18419057Women still do that all the time today. It's a thing you learn when you have kids.
>>18419067Yeah, the urge to run your hand through the hair of your kids or your spouse when their head is in your lap is basically a monkey instinct to check for lice or ticks.
>>18419008how do people clean their asses after defecation? my sister is caregiver to our mom, and i watched her neglect her, by not cleaning her butt. Mom ended up in the hospital due to diaper rash & cellulitis. I tried to file a police report but they said they care only about violent acts, not this passive-aggressive stuff.
lots of butthurt christcucks itt
>>18419008Such a bizarre picture
and we learned from all that dirty hygiene. Have you, nigger?
