As soon as I saw this thread title, I was going to link to that article! Good job Charlie
[QUOTE=Siam Sam]
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 deodorant remains alien to the culture. In traveling through Nepal, the odor was very noticeable.
I was trekking in the Mt Everest area in Nepal in 1981 before the special Traveller Inns along the route were established. At that time there was just no way to bathe, especially since it was in the middle of winter. Just washing my hands before eating practically gave me frostbite. But after weeks and weeks of not bathing and wearing the same clothes (including underwear), I didn’t notice any particularly bad odor from the 2 other Western travellers I was with or the Sherpa we were with.
However, that first shower after 5 weeks without one was quite pleasant to say the least.
My theory on this is that it was because your nose was “numbed” to the odor, not because you didn’t stink.
What does your house smell like? Everybody’s home has a unique smell, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. If you inhale deeply right now, you’ll be able to catch particular scents like a burning candle, or cigarette smoke, or the lingering aromas of your dinner, but you probably don’t notice your “house scent.” If I went into your house, though, I would be coming to it with a “fresh” nose and I would be able to smell it.
We get used to familiar odors. A pig farmer doesn’t really notice any more how badly his stys stink. People who live near factories which make noxious odors may notice if the odor changes or intensifies, but these constant smells become part of the “background noise” of our lives.
People in the past had a lot of “background smells”: streets caked with horse shit, outhouses and midden piles, rubbish among the rushes on the floor or the smell of the cow who was penned up in the house to be kept safe at night. I imagine the odor of their family and neighbors was something that just blended in and was filtered out, but the odor of a stranger would strike them as noticible.
One of the hit plays from the 15th century, “Mankind,” written about 1470 and designed for a company of professional strolling players, has this little goodie:
It is wreyten [written] with a coll [coal], it is wreyten with a coll,
He that schitith with his hoyll [hole], he that schitih with his hoyll,
But [unless] he wippe his ars clene, but he wippe his ars clene,
On his breche [breeches] it shall be sen, on his breche it shall be sen …
So at least butt-wiping WAS a concern. 
Standards of cleanliness vary greatly depending on what time and place you’re talking about. In Europe there were public baths built by the Romans that were in constant use for thousands of years. Bathing customs for pre-Roman tribes could have been pretty stringent too. The problem is that we just don’t know as much about many groups of people before contact with Rome as we do in the times after the Romans conquered them.
Cities have always been dirty and disgusting. No surprise, you get a lot of any animals living too close together and the problems of waste disposal get . . . interesting. The Industrial Revolution actually made some things worse. Not only did you have even more pollution than before, but any resource, including water, cost money. The influx of more people to the cities made water extremely expensive. If you didn’t have enough money, you couldn’t wash anything, including yourself, and the water you did have access to was likely dirty or contaminated by either the pervading filth of your fellow humans or industrial waste. Space was at such a premium that some of the poor couldn’t even afford enough room to sleep lying down but had to sleep sitting on benches in a flophouse.
Despite being poorer, people in the countryside of industrial countries were cleaner, better fed, and lived in better conditions than city dwellers for quite a long time. I’d venture to say that it wasn’t until well after the Depression that even relatively poor people who lived in cities could expect to be reasonably clean most of the time.
Also, just because you think other people are dirty and smell bad doesn’t mean that they don’t think the same thing about you. These things are often more subjective judgments than objective ones. Robert Humphrey was a conflict resolution specialist for the US government during the Cold War. In his book, one of the most frequent areas of tension he mentioned had to do with toilet and bathing customs. In some places, both the Americans and the locals would complain about how dirty the other group was.
Two incidents that I remember from that book were: how the Americans complained that it was disgusting that the locals wiped their butts with their hand and then washed the hand. When Humphrey checked with the locals, they said that it was disgusting to wipe with dry paper and not wash the area in between full-body baths. They contended that they washed up behind and then thoroughly washed the main hand too, and that their practice was a lot cleaner. Locals who worked in laundry services said the proof of that was that they never had to clean skid marks out of native underwear, but Americans sometimes left revolting brown stains behind. They washed local and American clothes and underwear separately because of that; they didn’t want their clothes contaminated with the American filth.
I can’t remember if it was the same group or a different one (I read the book about 10 years ago) but there was also a conflict with the bathing customs. Americans only bathed once a day, while natives of the area would often bathe twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening after the hottest part of the day, due to the climate. In addition, they had a practice of exfoliating their bodies with a rough cloth several times a week. Humphrey’s informants, boys who scrubbed down customers at the public baths, said that when they tried to actually get the Americans clean to local standards, they would be berated because of how hard they had to scrub to get off the accumulated dirt and dead skin. They complained that Americans never got clean and you could tell by how discolored their knees and elbows were.
A few years ago, me and a team of others led a themed youth camp. The theme was: “Survival in Prehistoric Times” and we camped in a barn in the middle of a nature-reserve. Thirty young people, August, and all we had to wash was a handpump and through. So most youngsters only washed their hands and face and brushed their teeth. We used an out-house over a dug pit.
When I arrived, I thought the other team members smelled bad. After a few hours, I didn’t notice it anymore. None of us could shower, so we didn’t. Wasn’t a problem. We got used to it pretty fast. I got some weird looks on my trip home from other people, though. I must have smelled bad too.
Newspaper! Why we would have killed for newspaper! Why when I was a boy we had to use Byzantine era clay tablets! And we were thankful!
Yeah, I know…sorry.
Regarding wool clothing, washing clothes after every wear, etc…
It being winter, I usually wear a sweater every day. Most of my sweaters are a wool blend, and I only wash them once a month or so. They never ever smell bad, even after many wearings. However, I have one sweater that is an acrylic/cotton blend. recently I noticed that the underarms smelled like BO! (Despite the fact that I shower and wear deodorant every day). I have heard that acrylic sweaters tend to absorb or even promote BO, has anyone else heard this?
Back to the OP, I also often wonder about hygiene in history, especially how women dealt with it. As a woman myself, I know that if I don’t wash thoroughly “down there,” especially during my time of the month, it can get really yucky feeling. How did women deal with keeping their privates clean if they didn’t wash frequently? This question goes even for modern times, for people who only bathe every other day, or once a week.
I wonder if that “yucky feeling” is more social than actually physical. If it’s social, then there’s no guarantee that women socialized in other cultural settings would have felt it. If it’s more physical, I’d imagine that they washed whenever they became uncomfortable, or perhaps their skin “toughened up” after years of neglect.
Right, and washing the genitals doesn’t take much time or water (or sand, or oil or whatever you use to wash). When I’m rustic camping for two or more weeks at a time, I make do with baby wipes or spot washing out of a bowl of warmed up water. Yes, the shower feels REALLY good afterwards, but I don’t feel terribly “yucky” in the meantime, even when I’m menstruating.
There’s a Viking Museum in York, England, that tries to recreate the smell of a typical Viking settlement. It stinks.
Baloney and poo poo - I’ll have you know Viking men were renowned and admired by the local lasses of England, seeing as they bathed, gosh golly, every saturday! Which was light years ahead of the local custom of twice a year.
Now my personal experience with the whole lack of hygiene is from my army days. 14 days out in the field, in the middle of winter, without access to showers or much water apart from what you melt in a pot equals very little in the way of cleanliness. I guess we all smelled to high heaven but nobody took note of it, seeing as one get used to BO quite fast in those conditions.