Yep, and they were often the same tubs used to wash the laundry and bleed the pigs at slaughtertime and smoosh the apples for cider at harvest and a number of other uses. So maybe the tub was in the laundry or near the slaughterhouse. Having multiple watertight tubs was simply too expensive for most people. If your tub had pig guts or cider or laundry in it, you’d simply wait to take a bath another day.
On a related note, is it true that people in desert areas “wash” with sand? How does that work, exactly? Sounds painful.
I recall reading something along these lines, where doctors were seeing diseases that hadn’t been seen in so long that they had names like “the rot” and “the crud”.
It does have rather the flavor of an urban legend, though…
Once I didn’t bathe for a little over a month (unless you count rain, snow or ice storms.) It was winter so I got to wear a lot of layers. My hair didn’t get too greasy, I rubbed snow through it all the time. I didn’t get any infections or die or anything.
There is a local religion that doesn’t permit washing of hair. My father met one of their adherents once, when he was working at the gas station (yes, he’s Indian. Yes, he doesn’t speak very good English. And yes, he worked at a gas station. Laugh. I still do.) She hadn’t washed her hair in 17 years, she said! :eek: Anyway, she seemed to be doing just fine…her hair was long, too. I would have thought lice at least, but she didn’t say. She washed everything else I presume.
I am surprised that nobody mentioned Tibet and parts of China where they are reputed to bathe only at birth and wedding. I know this is true. The various natives in the far North of Canada also are pretty sealed up in heavy clothing and bathe only very infrequently.
I can remember many years ago seeing a programme on TV where they tested the theory that not washing your hair had no detremental effect. It took a few weeks for people to get used to it but then the natural oils in the body took over and the hair then was kept clean by the oils.
I’ve just tried to back this up by searching but had no luck. I’m convinced I didn’t dream it though.
Ich…why, exactly, was this popular among hippies? Were they copying Mao,* or something?
*Mao Tse Tung said he didn’t bathe…although he did swim in a pool fairly often. He didn’t brush his teeth, though, IIRC. (Which I almost hope I’m not Recalling Correctly.)
I guess some hippies really were scuzzy. I went to college in the late '70s, at a time when many of us strove to continue some of the lifestyle elements of hippie culture–long hair, “head” music, and for some, drugs. But we all washed. I had fairly oily hair when I was younger; if I didn’t wash it at least once a day, it felt terrible!
When my dad was growing up in the poor rural South, you bathed on Saturday night. (So you’d be clean on Sunday, of course.) I assume it’s because all hot water had to be heated on the stove. I’m pretty sure all 8 kids had just the one set of bathwater, and they worked hard as tenant farmers so you know they were dirty.
Of course, I’m sure they washed throughout the week, just not a full-on bath.
There’s an awful lot of misinformation being promulgated in this thread. Nowadays we have such a fetish about cleanliness that we imagine we will become sick simply by not bathing. Not bathing, in and of itself, doesn’t have any particular ill effects. Off course, with the modern taboo against having any discernable natural body odor, it would affect your social life.
If you were walking around with little or no clothes there is no reason you would get skin infections. However, if you habitually wore wet or sweaty clothes there could be a problem. You wouldn’t develop lice unless you came in contact with someone else who had them (or their clothes or bedding).
As has been pointed out, in certain societies bathing has not been common. It doesn’t mean they were necessarily less healthy.
I was wondering more about hunter-gatherers, cave dwellers and human-like hominids… before the invention of organised washing. Surely our ancestors developed to withstand the effects of not bathing more than the occasional swim in a creek. I remember reading that children exposed to dirt have stronger immunie systems that those kept squeaky-clean. Is it possible that our frequent bathing makes us weaker?
Combing it would certainly get the physical crud out, and my understanding is that in medieval society, various powders would be combed through the hair, absorbing the oil, but it was a process that took quite some time. But I don’t think the oils on hair are any great risk in themselves; so long as the hair was combed and the scalp rubbed to get rid of skin flakes, it doesn’t matter much if your hair is oily.
The hippies of the day decided that pretty much everything their parents ever told them was wrong. Including, unfortunately, the need to bathe reasonably often.
Yep, that was the way it was for my first 13 years. We only had one tub and it was used for everything. Bathing was a weekly thing… in the summer time.
There is an old woman who volunteers in the museum in which I work. She used to be a rural school teacher, so she’s very familiar with “old time” customs which haven’t quite died out to this day in some parts.
She told me just the other day about ladies she knew who “washed” their hair with corn meal. They would rub it vigorously into their scalp and hair, and then carefully comb it out, removing the skin flakes and oil.* This was a way of washing the hair in the winter when hauling in water for a bath, and then shivering in a lukewarm tub of water in a cold room seemed unappealing. She didn’t say, but I’d imagine they would use “lice combs” to comb out the cornmeal residue since a regular comb wouldn’t be fine enough.
I imagine that the “sand baths” WhyNot mentioned would be much the same way. I doubt highly that you would vigorously scrub the skin, but sort of rub the sand gently over the surface to absorb oils. (On the plus side it would do a hell of an exfoiliating job!) I also doubt that the sand would be rubbed into, ahem . . . sensitive areas.
You can also use this method on oily spots on clothing which can’t be washed. Many of the clothing items in earlier times couldn’t be laundered. (What would be washed is the linens you wore next to the skin.) You would rub the spots with cornmeal or powdered bran.
