Can anyone tell me about hygiene before the age of hygiene. I’m guessing that people smelled pretty bad but that everyone was used to it an it was all OK. At the same time, I’m thinking that they smell of an unwiped bum is something that no one gets used to.
Tell me about past hygiene.
How often to people bath?
How did they wipe their …?
Did they wash their clothes?
What did women do when … you know.
There were times in history in which bathing was not as frequent as it is today for various reasons of practicality and culture. Body odor was unavoidable, but people did always try to combat it with perfumes and the like. In some cities, there were public baths, but taking a tub bath was often unworkable for many people, considering the amount of labor involved, so they washed using a small basin of water. Considering that there was no central heating, this was probably not a popular activity in the winter time.
Asses were sometimes wiped with pieces of rag or sponge which would then be washed and hung to dry for the next use. Others at time used leaves or pieces of scrap paper (after it became cheap and mass-produced.)
During some time periods (for an example, the Tudor period), clothes were sometimes too elaborate to be washed or made of materials which can’t be immersed in water. The person who wore them would wear linen beneath to try to catch as much body soil as possible. The linen could be washed; the outer garment would be aired, brushed, sometimes powdered and spot-cleaned. When clothes became more simple, such as those made of cotton, they were washed in a tub of water, rubbed against a rough surface to loosen dirt. Whites were often boiled, stirred in a large pot over a fire with a wooden paddle.
Menstruating women wore a cloth to catch the blood. Before underwear was commonly worn, women would wrap their pelvis with a sort of diaper-like garment to catch the blood. Later, there were belts and the like to hold the cloth in place. Some people believe that it is possible that some ancient cultures employed tampons because of snippets of text which seem to refer to them, but this is still debated.
Maybe I’m wrong here, but I get the sense that the hugely negative connotations associated with “body odor” were largely developed by perfume and deodorant sellers to create fear and self-consciousness in people, and thereby sell more of their goods. I’m not convinced that most common people were all that concerned about this smell throughout most of history.
In Thailand, South Asians tend to be discriminated against, in part because they have a reputation for smelling bad. And I think it’s true that Western-style deoderant remains alien to the culture. In traveling through Nepal, the odor was very noticeable, and I remember thinking that this must be what it smelled like in Europe and America way back when. Except for the smell of pungent spices and such. But you know what? After a couple of days, you don’t really notice the body odor around you any more.
My Thai wife, who is Western-educated, found it hard at first to suppress the anti-South Asian prejudices that she was taught growing up, but she was pleasantly surprised how much she enjoyed the country and the people.
In rural, agricultural areas, plant materials would be used. Leaves were common. Stalks of straw from oats of wheat plants could be used. Also “hay balls”, basically a small tuft of hay folded or bent over into a ball or pad. Avoiding thistles was advisable! Note that hay could be used for animal feed, and so was more valuable than straw, which is mainly used for bedding. But hay tends to be a more effective ‘wipe’ than straw.
I’ve read on the boards that without constant washing, the body’s main odor producing areas tend to reach a homeostasis of sorts with bacteria, so that a person who normally washes (and removes and kills bacteria) in these areas will smell worse after a few days of not washing than a person who rarely washes would smell.
When I moved to rural Ireland in the mid-90s, many of the middle-aged and older gentlemen I met did not wear any form of deodorant. And they didn’t shower or bathe as much as I would be used to - once every two or three days. It wasn’t totally disgusting, but not too pleasant either.
Unfortunately we have a person in the office where I work who doesn’t believe in washing and the stink doesn’t reach any kind of “homeostasis”… she reeks on a regular basis. For a while they would talk to her and send her home to bathe. Now they’re just too embarassed to talk to her and people just take a wide berth of her and her desk. That, plus the fact that they’ve installed several industrial deodorizers on her desk helps a little. But even her coat smells when it hangs on the coat rack, and that’s in a completely different room. I still can’t believe that the person who’s office that’s in doesn’t complain and ask it to be removed. I gag every time I have to walk past that rack.
First off many people still stink, even if they try not too.
I have to say that my grandpas old out house had corn husks in it, and the proverbial Sears catalog. I didn’t have to use it. Thank God!
Lips_Obsession, I have a very similar coworker. I used to have to sit right next to her, but my frequent complaints about “the air” (as my boss actually recommended I refer to her stinkiness) caused her to be moved to a different cube. No homeostasis reached here.
solkoe, I think about your questions all the time, especially when watching romantic movies set in earlier times. It’s bad enough watching a modern couple engage in deep morning kissing without brushing, but sex scenes in period movies are almost repulsive. I have to imagine the characters as their actors instead (O.K., Rob Roy is clean - look: he’s dripping with water from a very recent washing. But what about his mouth? No problem - Liam Neeson brushed his teeth right before he went onscreen), which ruins the whole suspension of disbelief thing.
Modern hygiene makes me very glad to live in our modern world.
I think some of you are letting your imagination run wild here. I grew up in the 40’s and we used a hand pump, for water, until I was about 8 or 9. We washed daily, usually several times (ie. before meals and after the toilet), but only took a full bath once, or twice, a week, water had to be heated on a stove. I was 13 before we had “indoor plumbing”. The worst part of using an outhouse is the weather. There were chamberpots, for middle of the night use. Kids didn’t use deoderant when I was young, it was an adult thing. Deoderant wasn’t as effective then. Women wore “dress shields” in their underarms and men wore tee shirts under their outer shirts, to absorb body odor.Toothbrushing goes back several millenia. I’ve used scrap paper in the privy, but not corncobs. I have shucked field corn though, and the cobs are quite soft until they are dried out for several days, so I can see them being used, but I seriously doubt they were hung up for reuse. TP was considerably more expensive back then and the quality was nothing like today, so the Sears & Roebuck catalog was a reasonable alternative, it’s being printed on “rag” paper stock. Plus, people tended to get as much use out of things as possible, not like today where almost everthing seems to be disposable. The rationing of WWII served to reinforce this, but the necessity of it goes back much further.
As far as wearing clean undergarments and spot cleaning outwear, don’t we do that to this day?
This reminds me of the time when some new kids started riding the school bus in middle school. They were foreign, from a culture that obviously did not believe in deoderant or changing clothes from day to day. The kids smelled really bad, and everyone on the bus suffered. Some of us would suffer silently, while others would moan and make a big theatrical performance out of opening windows and fanning the air. The bus driver would complain too. I felt so sorry for them, but I’m not sure they understood what was up. They may have thought we were falsely accusing them of BO simply because they were new and from another country.
I think they bathed, but the combination of wearing no deoderant and wearing the same clothes everyday worked against them.
I picked up an old Smithsonian the other day and read an article about a series of French and English ships that scouted New England for trading and settlement around the 1500s. The article made a big deal out of the fact that the Native Americans at the time were deeply put off by the European lack of hygiene, that they were dirty and they stunk. They made much of the idea that the Native Americans prized personal cleanliness highly and that the French and English did not.
No cite and all, have zero idea how true this is, so there you are. 
I’ve seen the sort of descriptions to which you’re referring. A lot of novels set in the early colonial days repeat it. I’ve never seen a first-hand account of it: it’s usually something mentioned without a source.
Sometimes, you also see the opposite. I’ve seen excerpts of letters or diaries in which whites complained that the Natives smelled bad because of their clothing or the grease they used on their hair.* Little House on the Prairie* has one such description, when Natives wearing skunk pelts visit the Ingalls’ home.
A.R. Cane, your post is fascinating. I love first-hand experience from days past. Thank you.
You wrote “As far as wearing clean undergarments and spot cleaning outwear, don’t we do that to this day?” I personally agree; I wear pants for about 4 or 5 days, jackets for a week or so, etc.; however, from reading a recent thread on the SDMB, I recall that quite a few people wash outerwear after every use. I find that quite shocking.
I should add that when I was a kid in the 1970s in England we had a bath once every two or three days. We also shared bathwater between all the kids (4 of us), with a rota determining who got the first go in the water. Also, when I was a student we were so poor that we used newspaper in the toilet if we couldn’t steal toilet roll from our college or other public institution.
If you want a really interesting read on the place of odor in an 18th and 19th century society, including considerable discussion of issues such as bathing, perfume, sewage and garbage disposal, etc., i highly recommend historian Alain Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. I had to read it as an undergrad, and i found it fascinating.
Cool! Thanks for the recommendation.
I think people smelled quite a bit in the good old days…most people wore wool clothes (silk was too expensive, except for the rich); dry cleaning didn’t come abou till the 1890’s. So regardless of bathing, the clothes still stank. Medieval perfumes were much stronger than those used today-mostly to suppress he odors. By the way, do vegetarians smell better than meat eaters? The chinese thought that visiting europeans smelled like corpses-was this because of a diet high in meat?
Wait a sec. I was actually going to start a thread the other day about how and why wool doesn’t stink if you don’t wash it for a while. I have a single pair of 100% wool socks (for the record, 80% wool is better in terms of fit - 100% aren’t elastic enough), and for complicated reasons (involving slightly more than just my distaste of doing laundry), I wore them for five days straight, no bathing. While I certainly stunk (by modern standards) at the end of it, I was shocked to remove the socks at the end of the term and find that they were just fine. No stink, no stickiness, no grunge, none of that stiffness that cotton socks have after just a few hours.
I think the fact that they wore more wool might work *against *your argument - wool doesn’t stink up like cotton, and even cotton doesn’t stink up like synthetic fibers.