If I don’t shower for 3-4 days my scalp begins to itch and feel uncomfortable. Longer than that my pits and nether regions follow. After maybe 2 days of not brushing my teeth my mouth feels like a decaying swamp. Is this because my body is pampered by modern hygiene and it would just get over it after awhile? Or did ancient peoples put up with this all the time? Did they have methods to reduce these unpleasant feelings? Or was it a background feeling that persisted throughout life?
Thank you for sharing.
As someone who had dreadlocks for a considerable time when younger I can confirm, your scalp does stop itching if you don’t wash it for a long time… don’t ask how long I won’t admit that.
But for the rest, I get the feeling people had a lot of permanent low level discomfort, but if you’ve never known any different that would seem normal wouldn’t it?
Your scalp and skin are designed to produce lubricating oils in a certain quantity. When you shower them off every day/every other day (or however often you shower), your body anticipates this and starts to produce more to compensate.
In the days before the high levels of current soap and water use, people would have produced oils at a much slower level so that discomfort wouldn’t be such an issue. In the Little House on the Prairie books, we see that a whole family bathed in the same water only once a week in the winter, and swam in the 'crick during summers in addition to the weekly bath. They used soap made from animal fat, so they were reasonably hygienic compared to people even a couple hundred years prior.
I’m reminded also of an MST3K short from the 50s, where young girls were instructed to wash their hair on the same night every week (although daily showers were encouraged, while wearing a shower cap). And every night they were supposed to brush 100 (or however many) strokes to distribute the oil from scalp to tip. The obsession with daily showers is a very recent thing indeed.
I can’t speak to the dental issue from experience, but it seems likely that back then, processed sugars (which cause much of today’s tooth decay) were not an issue. People didn’t live as long (especially in prehistoric days) and weren’t concerned with cosmetic issues like yellow or decaying teeth, as long as they could still chew things. And they had fingernails too, which would be used to scrape bits of junk out of their teeth. After a nice manual tooth scraping, their mouths probably felt just fine.
It’s also possible (totally speculating here) that they may have chewed on “minty” leaves, super fresh veggies, or other things as part of their diet, which would make their mouth feel fresher without having to use toothbrush/paste.
It is totally possible to acclimate your body to less soap. Some girls have transitioned to washing their hair with the no-shampoo (no-poo) method, using just conditioner or baking soda or vinegar. Some people still wet their hair every day but only wash it every week. It takes a few weeks for your body to recognize that it doesn’t need SO MUCH OIL! And once it does tone down the oil production, you can wash your hair once a week if you really want to.
If you work and sweat, your body doesn’t get dirtier over time. The sweat washes things away. You stay at a certain level, which isn’t that bad but doesn’t match modern American standards. Now, if you think of the sweat itself as a kind of dirt, then you have to shower a whole lot.
Imagine some day to come, when we realize that spit is disgusting and won’t tolerate it in our mouths. We will constantly rinse, so that there is only clean water in there. Or maybe designer water.
I can support this with an anecdote. When I go on the Atkins diet it seems like my teeth stay cleaner. So it seems a low carb diet would be better for your teeth.
I think in Roman times, people there bathed relatively frequently. In the Lindsay Davis stories, Falco wakes up and brushes his teeth with some kind of stick. I assume that she is historically accurate on such details. But in the middle ages, cleanliness was not only not considered close to godliness, but quite the contrary, it was thought to mean you spent too much time thinking about this life instead of the next. Also I expect that fleas were the most annoying thing, more than random itching. And you probably did spend much of your life in a state of mild (or worse) discomfort.
In the Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Chamber - set about 250 years ago - the characters would rub their teeth with salt and rinse their mouths with tea.
I hiked to the Mt. Everest Base camp in Nepal over a 5 week period in the middle of winter. The water in the streams we passed over was much too cold to bathe in. Washing your hands before eating was quite painful. I felt fine the whole time and wasn’t really “itching” for a shower.
My scalp began to itch after about a week, but soon after that the discomfort went away. I never noticed my fellow hikers odor, but I’m sure we perspired quite a bit while we hiked 6 or 7 hours a day.
At around 14.000’ I had to stop for a day to acclimate. The Inn that I stayed at was run by two young 18 or 19 y.o. girls. They brushed their long hair for hours during the day I was there in an effort to keep it clean. And their hair did look clean even though it had probably been months since the weather had been warm enough for them to wash it.
(As I found out later the Inn turned out to be a brothel for the local Sherpa men. I thought it was a bit strange that these two girls were running an Inn in the middle of nowhere. I guess business was slow because they seemed happy to offer me a place to stay for the night.)
But did you…partake…in their services?
I read a decent book about this topic not long ago: The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, by Katherine Ashenburg. It traces the history of the standards of personal cleanliness in the Western world. My personal favorite bit is the 17th-century notion that simply changing into clean linen was a superior alternative to bathing with water.
Now that’s gross.
Imagine diving in to a place that hadn’t been washed for months and had countless unwashed Sherpas come before you.