A couple points to correct.
First, it’s important to emphasize that it was Europeans who stank. You do mantion this once in passing, but during the time period in question, Muslim culture was extremely widespread and required frequent washing for prayer. They washed hands, feet, face, mouth, and nose before every prayer, and after sex or a potty break, they washed those bits, too. Women needed a full bath after their period, too. I suspect that Jews living in European countries were pretty clean, too, because at least the women have to bathe once a month. Rom culture also demands bathing. Perhaps that’s why the Europeans were so distrustful of these others- you couldn’t smell them coming!
Also, the part about white underclothes is true but much earlier than you mention. In fact, Europeans wore an underlayer chemise or shirt back as far as I’ve been able to tell. I don’t know that it was always linen. Some of the under layers were quite sheer, but they were always there. I suspect that it was not white, merely undyed in many cases. The purpose was not to help keep the body clean by friction, but to prevent the outer clothing from getting ruined by sweat .
When you start a thread, it is helpful to other readers if you provide a link to the column. In this case, it’s today’s column, but in a week or so it will have fallen into the abyss of the Archives, so you save readers lots of search time by giving them a link.
This one: Is good personal hygiene a recent invention? (Did the days of old really stink?)
No biggie, HennaDancer, you’ll know for next time.
I was thinking the same thing: an interesting follow-up to the column would be on bathing habits in other areas (pre-Columbus Americas, central and Eastern Asia, Africa, Australia, etc.) My understanding is that Japan has a long history of cleanliness and that the Japanese were largely disgusted by Europeans when they first met; I really have no idea how it was in the other areas mentioned.
Daniel
I was wondering what good smells of non-bathing europeans were lost when they started bathing. Right in his first paragraph Cecil mentions losing good smells. And incense doesn’t cut it. We still have that and we bathe.
I wonder what the average dentition was like during the early and middle ages. I feel that sugar, when it became popular, was the downfall of humanities pearly whites.
It’s far too broad a generalization to simply say that “Europeans stank”. Depends on the specific European culture, the specific period, and of course personal preferences.
In my experience travelling, it’s hard to smell the people over the sewers. Even in places where bathing is a religious duty, the smells of sewage, food, animals, smoke and other unsavories add a whole new dimension to things. I got to know a hundred different types of sewage. Your average open sewer is a four inch moat that flows like a little river past your house. On bigger streets these might drain into a foot-wide moat in the middle. In cities, the “sidewalk” is just a huge sewer trench with a line of square slabs of rock thrown across it to form a walkway. Often these sidewalks end up being places of business and homes. Hopefully there is a river nearby to drain everything in to- although thats also the same water everyone uses for everything.
Many people don’t bother with toilets at all and facing away from the road is good enough for #1.
One might be troubled by Cecil’s 21st century North-American-centered answer.
If one travels most anywhere in the world and talks to the natives, you’ll find a somewhat different situation. Even though they don’t bathe all that frequently, they don’t smell as badly as we do when we neglect to bathe. That’s partially because they are at bacterial homeostasis with their environment, and we are not.
If you use soap and water and deodorants you are killing off almost all the bacteria off your skin. If you then neglect to wash and/or apply deodorant, new bacteria move in and make a huge stink, which is our experience. But if you lay off the soap and chemicals and let the microbes stabilize, over time, most people will end up stinking much less than we’d expect.
Not that I’d ever go back to anything less than 1-2 showers per day and copious amounts of aluminum chlorhydrate! But in general the world stinks (of B.O.) a whole lot less than you might expect.
( Now stinky HAIR and stinky outhouses, those can be baaaad! (
I doubt that. At least in my experience, after a few days of not bathing and sweating a lot, you cease to smell any worse. And, if you’re with companions who are in the same boat, you all just sort of get used to the smell of B.O. and it doesn’t bother you. This is from Boy Scout hiking trip experience. However, when a different group of scouts came by us, we could definitely tell that they reeked, even though we all smelled fine to ourselves.
Any vets here who can comment on not bathing for an extended period?
Some early Christian writers actually condemned bathing as a decadent excess! Ascetics would demonstrate their mortification* of the flesh by never bathing, among other practices.
*not literally, one would hope.
BTW: I seldom use soap except for washing my hands and shampoo for my hair, and no one has told me I smell bad. I think there’s something to the bacterial homeostasis theory.
But it’s vital to wear clean clothing, especially underwear, every day because dirty clothing stinks to high heaven very quickly.
our fetish about bathing (and smellling bad) is very very new to humanity.I’d say it started about 1940’s in america, and 1950’s in England.
In London,-- 1966, I knew 7 yr old children who would say “Last night was my bath night, so I missed that TV program”( or whatever). I dont know if they had 2,3 or 4 bath nights each week,but I know that they did not bathe every day.This was 1966!!! Americans were deeply into the space race,the movie 2001 was released, --and English children still scheduled their bath times as special occcasions. Weird!!!
Anybody who has ever enjoyed hiking and camping knows that it is no big deal not to take a shower for a week. After 2 days, your smelliness levels off, and doesnt get any worse. And it really isnt that bad–nothing as bad as the smell from your horse would have been for a rich gentleman riding on his Victorian manor estate., or the chamber pots which must have been in almost every room.
The real question is about lice and fleas–which were probably very very commonNow that would empty out a room full of us moderns pretty damn quick.
People around here still think they do.
I think the problem with Europeans and bathing had a lot to do with excesive modesty. To take a bath you had to expose your naked skin, and touch yourself (the horror!). The Native Indians at the time Columbus arrived here did bath a lot, what with living semi-naked and near the rivers that wasn’t a problem.
I don’t know what the reason was, but frequent showers (at the very least once a day) became a norm here. People are deeply offended by BO, and for some reason visiting tourist, specially Europeans tend to smell, well, not nicely (maybe they have more relaxed hygienic schedules or the heat around here decomposes them), giving birth to the belief that Europeans in general stink.
The custom of now showering and covering your BO with parfum is known here as El Arte Español (the Spanish art).
I think Cecil should have covered other cultures at the time.
And a supporting datapoint to that placed by my neighbor from the other side of the Mona Passage, is a little ditty popular among Boriucua kids in my youth that had the verse,
“En España
la gente
no se baña”
A free translation that retains the tune and rhyme would be:
“Folks in Spain
think bathing
is a pain”
You could say that, but you’d be wrong. Almost every area on Earth has bathing tradition- from the Roman baths to Scandanavian saunas to Japanese hot springs and Native American sweat lodges. Most religions- including Hinduism, Islam and Judaism, have a concept of ritual cleanliness. Simply put, you must stay clean to be able to participate in religion. Hinduism- the world’s oldest religion- requires daily bathing before prayers, and accords a very special status to bathing areas. In India he largest market for consumer good- and the first consumer goods people buy when they become economically able to purchase consumer goods- is detergents.
Widespread aversion to bathing supported by institutions such as religion and science was a brief phenomena confined to medieval and Victorian Europe.
Several years ago I read somewhere (I don’t remember where) that the fairly recent practice of bathing everyday (in this country, at least) has led to a decrease in dermatalogical complaints. Can anyone point to data on this subject?
The storys around here (Minnesota) tell of the Finn’s would build the Sauna 1st. and then the home. That(custom) must have started quite some time back.
Around the same time as the Finn’s were imigrating, the forest of northern MN were being cut for the white pine that were so plentyfull. Thoughts of the stench of the lumberjacks, with the lice, and poor substitue for T P (leaves, newspaper,catalog pages, etc. No wonder they liked to fight. What a relive it must have been to have a sore jaw to cover up the pain of a swamp ass.
The natives to North America used steam for bathing, (sweat lodges ) I forget what the eskimo’s called their sweat lodges. They must date back a long way.
One thing that bothers me about this whole discussion is the unstated assumption that washing=bathing, and vice-versa. But anyone who’s been in hospital (or even just recovered from surgery at home) can tell you that a small amount of water, a little soap, and a rag can get a body pretty clean even without total immersion. Certainly, the quantities of water required for bathing would be an incredible luxury in a private home for most of humanity’s history - and the somewhat-affordable alternative, public baths, have a sexual subtext that might be suspect in some cultures. But the absence of either doesn’t mean people didn’t wash.
My dad and his siblings (he’s the oldest, born in 1943 in Massachusetts) joke about how when they were kids they took a bath every thursday, whether they needed it or not. I’ve never been sure how serious they were.
“a rich stew of scents”
Congrats to Cecil on using one of the most revolting descriptions I ever heard.
I don’t know why. Reading that just made me go bleah.