So, for ever I’ve seen the assumption that hygiene levels pre-modern day were horrendous. That people had a single set of clothes that were never washed and they never bathed, and as a result they were walking around smelling HORRIBLE inside clouds of dirt like, was it Pigpen? in the old cartoon strip.
But, really, is that true? Because it seems to me that this can’t be so. I don’t care if you wear the same jeans and Tshirt every day for ten years without washing it. Dust and dirt and skin oils/dead cells/organic debris simply can’t keep amassing until there a six inch coating all over you. Mechanical flexing of the cloth as you move will tend to ‘pop’ little bits of it loose, and gravity will take it away. Or it will abrade off from contact with whatever. The oils and skin cells and such are no doubt used as food by bacteria and higher parasites and broken down into gases and water and such that simply evaporate and go away. I mean, we’re essentially a bunch of carbon and nitrogen and hydrogen and oxygen atoms that were hooked together against entropy by plants and other animals, right? And without something deliberately working to keep it together, it’s all going to turn back into the precursor stuff eventually.
So I think there must be a “maximum level of dirt.” Yeah, your clothes won’t be pristine, far from it. I imagine cloth would tend to end up somewhere along the spectrum between white and the color of the dirt (ground) in your local area. And you’d have BO for sure – but not to a level that would cause other people to keel over at a distance of a meter or two.
Your hypothesis is eminently testable - there are plenty of people who don’t bathe or wash their clothes, either out of lack or poor hygiene. Go find them and check!
I’ve run across people that were probably at or close to the “maximum level of dirt”. You might not actually keel over from the smell at a meter or two, but it sure isn’t pleasant. Humans are capable of getting extremely funky if they don’t bathe or change clothes for awhile.
Well, the Japanese of that time were the opposite. They were a VERY clean society as a whole, especially for that time. When the first northern Europeans arrived there, the Japanese were horrified by the filthy stink that assaulted their senses.
Steve Wright, teaching a 2nd generation in Japan: “The Japanese thought the first Europeans (Portuguese sailors, SW off of Kyushu in 1547 IIRC) were hairy, smelly, uncouth, butt-ugly, and both fascinating and repulsive beyond words. You’ll still find some Japanese with this same opinion today.”
I’ve worked with the homeless/mentally ill. After a while, they all smell the same. Of course, by then, everything reeks and you just kind of get used to it.
One a young man came into the office to apply for food stamps and was so unpleasant that he was almost asked to leave (that’s hard to do, you’ve got to be a real jerk to get kicked out of a food stamp office out this way). When he came back the next day to finish, he was a different person. People marveled at the change, especially because he didn’t have his food stamps yet. I pointed out that he was clean and it was pretty much agreed that being clean was the only difference for him between days.
I’m saying that to say that pre-modern people tended to live around water and that splashing around in water has been an important part of human life since forever. I’d guess they were cleaner than history assumes, somebody had to have had a use for soap or it wouldn’t have been developed and become so common that I can be sure that you have some in your home.
That may be an insurmountable challenge for a civilian. I mean, US Navy submarines are still secure spaces filled with classified materials, aren’t they?
My understanding is that this is because East Asians, on the whole, have fewer apocrine sweat glands than do Europeans. Apocrine sweat glands are concentrated in areas of your body where you have wiry body hair (underarms, groin, nipples, etc.), and produce a type of perspiration that, when bacteria munch on it, produces that characteristic body odor.
Many East Asians also have less body hair in those regions of the body – and hair in those areas helps to provide a warm, damp environment that lets said bacteria thrive.
Premodern people had more than one set of clothes unless they were desperately poor, and they most certainly did wash their clothes. Not after a single use, to be sure, but there are references to doing laundry in works as varied as Homer’s Odyssey and Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, and the only reason there aren’t more of them is that people often don’t write down stuff for posterity about ordinary household chores, especially ones done by women.
They also washed their bodies, although whether this took the form of full-on immersive bathing or just sponging yourself off over a basin depended on the society and the facilities available.
I shudder to think what people without indoor heating (so most of the world “back then”) did in the winter. Bathing would be cold work, and some might be too poor to own more than one set of clothing, plus dirt floors, close contact with farm animals and wattle and daub huts… yuck.
I suspect bathing has been common in most societies, even if it wasn’t daily, so in practice reaching the “maximum level of dirt” was pretty rare. Maybe typically in winter, or when people came up with anti-bathing theories. Even if someone didn’t own more than one set of clothes, I figure they took a dip and washed their clothes (or had someone else wash their clothes) at the same time, so even that “one and only tunic” got washed sometimes.
Or maybe they could just tolerate the smell. What your neighbor smelled like hardly mattered when there’s sewage in the streets and in the ditch around town.
I’ve read that your skin adjusts to how much you dry it out (by washing, for example) and if you bathe/shampoo more frequently your body will increase its production of oils. Conversely, if you bathe/shampoo less frequently, and/or put lots of moisturizers on your body, your skin will produce its own moisturizing at a reduced rate. That dynamic, if true, argues in favor of the OP’s thesis.
My personal experience hasn’t particularly borne this out, however. I shampoo my hair every single day or it’s a nasty, stringy oily mess. For an entire year I cut back to washing my hair every 3-4 days because I had read that my scalp would adjust and my hair would eventually stop being so greasy after 24 hours.
It didn’t work AT ALL and the greasy feel of my hair made my miserable. I eventually gave up and went back to a daily shampoo.
I may be unusual, though. Clearly I am an oilier character than most
When i was young, I had to wash my hair daily. When I hit my 40’s, my hair liked it better when i washed it every other day. Now my hair wants to be washed every three days or it will get frizzy and split ended.
Saying that to say that age also affects the amount of body oils you produce.
You’ve clearly never been on the NYC subway during summer and had the pleasure of a particularly extra funky homeless person walking through the car. The stench is truly overpowering. Though I don’t imagine pre-modern people were pissing and shitting in their clothes, so I doubt they were as bad as it can get.
Yep, even in the middle ages, changing and washing your clothes was one of the main ways to stay clean, especially in cold countries where even if you lived near a river or lake it was too cold to wash in, and if you lived in warm areas getting naked was either frowned upon or actively dangerous due to the wildlife.
They wore clothes in layers partly due to warmth and partly because the lower layer would be cheap, easily washable material. It would rake a lot of the sweat and dirt away from you. It would still only be washed once a week, so that’s a lot by our standards, but quite a lot of even pretty poor people had more than one set of underclothes.
They were usually way more substantial than what we think of as underclothes, it’d be pretty much like a t-shirt and an undershirt, possibly even also what we now think of as a shirt, but without the collar - and knee-length-boxers for both sexes - so getting them laundered was more like washing our contemporary clothes, but not your jeans, waistcoat, or coat, really.
Me, too. My hairdresser told me she only shampoos once a week (!), when I said I washed my hair every day. Rarely, I go two days between shampoos. Of course, she’s Korean, so maybe it’s that East Asian thing?
You’ve heard the phrase “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”? That originated in the old practice of bathing once a week (or thereabouts) because it was such a hassle to heat that much water for a family, and the baby was bathed last because it got the dirtiest due to not being potty trained.
Actually, that’s a myth. The saying originated in 1500’s Germany. As you can see from this woodcut, babies were bathed in small tubs. It took a great deal of water to fill a tub large enough to hold an adult, water that had to be hauled and heated in batches. Babies needed bathing more often, and it was far easier to place a small tub on a table, fill it with warm water, and bathe the infant that way than it would have been to stoop down and try to hold a slippery baby in a big tub full of (dirty) water.
Do you mean central heating? Humans have had indoor heating ever since we’ve had an “indoors”.
People in cold areas bathed next to the stove. Hauling the water around was usually a bigger problem.
They’re probably also not eating right; and may be physically ill. Both of those things can make you stink in a way that just not washing often doesn’t produce.
I went to a girls’ boarding school in the early 1960’s (in the USA). We washed our underwear, socks, cotton shirts, and gym shorts by hand in the sinks. Our uniform skirts, vests, and blazers were wool. We took them home at vacation time to get them drycleaned; inbetween we only spotwashed anything that got spilled on them. The dresses we wore to dinner, and the jodhpurs those who rode horses wore only while doing so and while in the barn, were also IIRC generally washed only when taken home at vacation time.
