notes
1. P. E. Razzell, 'An Interpretation of the Modern Rise of Population in Europe', Population Studies, 28 5-17 1974 , 13 W. Reyburn, Flushed with Pride The Story of Thomas Crapper London Macdonald, 1969 Lawrence Wright, Clean and Decent The History of the Bath and Loo, and of Sundry Habits, Fashions and Accessories of the Toilet Principally in Great Britain, France and America London Routledge amp Kegan Paul, 1960 . See also Lucinda Lambton, Temples of Convenience and chambers of Delight London...
The Public Baths
We can view the medieval baths culture of northern Europe as being similar to the bathhouse culture of Japan or Finland it was innocent of any shame. No one blushes for their nakedness in the communal baths and saunas of Japan or Finland. No one blushed in ancient Germany, where, as Julius Caesar noted, 'both sexes bathe communally in rivers, and display the body mostly naked under small covers of animal hides'. Nor in medieval Europe, where communal naked bathing, and the segregation of the...
Water Water Water
Skin care, nudity, and water go together and water evidently mattered a lot to the Greeks. They paid particular attention to water in their new-built settlements. For the Greeks a pure water supply was an important part of public policy and a very visible sign of civic growth and prosperity. They collected rainwater in stone cisterns and drew from springs and wells but from the sixth century bce, impressive new public water supplies were created from artificial conduits. The tyrants of Samos,...
Naturism
The two key empirics who reinvented the nature cure were Arnold Rikli, who opened his 'sanatorium' in the Swiss mountains at Veldes in the 1870s, and Adolf Just, author of the mystic Return to Nature 1896 , who opened Jungborn in the Austrian Harz Mountains in the 1880s. Both took their cue from Priess-nitzian hydropathy but took it a step further. They preferred patients to take their baths naked and exposed to the elements Adolf Just even revived the eighteenth-century vitalist earth bath...
chapter 3 greek hygiene
Greek personal hygiene was a philosophy of life that went well beyond good grooming. In the name of their young goddess, princess, or high priestess of health Hygieia, the Greeks ultimately brought another permanent layer of meaning to the idea of cleanliness. We are all hygienic now. Leaving eastern Eurasia and Middle Eastern history behind us, we move west into the Mediterranean and end up on its northern shores Greece in the Bronze Age, c.1500-600 bce, followed by an exciting period of...
Poverty and Doubt
Amidst all this frenzy of political, social, and economic activity and reform the very poorest were still completely powerless. Although by the end of the century Britain was, to the outward eye, a clean and washed nation, the inhabitants knew better. The immaculate Victorian home was a middle-class dream, with a big shortfall. As one cleric dourly noted in 1889 The rich man's family may grow up unbroken around the hearth The children of the poor must die What is it to the poor that it has been...
Graded Holiness
The divine 'means of embellishment' took cleansing into a different dimension. In order to understand anything about the full political significance of the toilette and its relationship to society, one needs to understand the workings of ancient courts and palaces and of temples. In Mesopotamia the earliest kings were simply successful political candidates, primus inter pares first among equals , but by the end of the Early Dynastic this had been superseded by the doctrine of divine kingship....
The Private Parts
'The cleanliness of the rest of your person, which, by the way, will conduce greatly to your health, I refer from time to time to the bagnio,' remarked Chesterfield casually, but not urgently.9 He might have known better than to send his son to France with that advice or perhaps he assumed that French aristocratic males merely looked on while their womenfolk bathed and sluiced. In France the aristocratic tendre for cosmetic cleanliness that had developed during the seventeenth century had...
Christian Purity
Cleanness was innate to the Holy Spirit. According to the early theology of Jesus Christ, Jesus carried his holiness within and about him, in incorruptible flesh. Like any sacred priest, anything he touched made it holy. When Jesus washed the leper's feet, or embraced other untouchables, such as the poor, the sick, or the prostitute Mary Magdalene, he was not thereby rendered unclean. On the contrary, his holiness, his cleanness, healed them and made them whole. For Christians, full purity was...
William Buchan
Thanks to the influence of John Locke, children's health and medicine paediatrics had become a strong clinical speciality in Britain. William Cadogan's famous Essay upon Nursing, and the Management of Children, which urged natural breastfeeding and was against unnatural swaddling, was published in 1748, some fourteen years before Rousseau while William Buchan's Domestic Medicine 1769 , written by an enlightened and sensitive Edinburgh children's doctor, became the best-selling British practical...
Training and Gymnastics
From the eighth century bce onwards the stadiums and palaes-tras probably functioned like an experimental laboratory for the therapeutics of hygiene, taking on the challenge to bring and keep a single body in perfect condition through exact training and regimen. Behind the scenes stadiums were lively medical meeting-places, used for viewing both routine and unusual surgical cases. Physical therapies were constantly being devised especially for the athletes during intensive physiotherapy...
The Trotula Corpus
It has long been thought that Trotula was a woman physician working in Salerno who wrote a famous book on cosmetics but recent detective work has proved that this was a myth perpetuated in the 1544 edition by a humanist doctor, Georg Kraut. Like so many medieval popular works, the corpus of work known as The Trotula was compiled by many different hands. During the twelfth century in Salerno two scholarly tracts, Treatise on the Diseases of Women and On the Conditions of Women, were bound...
The Salerno Regimen
Salerno was originally a Roman coastal health resort and spa, situated 35 miles south-east of Naples down the coast from Baiae. In 847 Salerno became the port capital of a new Lombard principality, and the first Benedictine medical monks arrived. Over 300 years nine monasteries were established, and Salerno's three Roman aqueducts were rebuilt, serving a series of public fountains, the old public bathhouses, and private customers en route, some with their own private bathhouses including the...
Puritan Grooming
Each Reformed body was the temple of the soul, kept pure by the familiar practices of asceticism diet, dress, voice, gait, demeanour, and religious duties. Ascetic doctrines effectively threw a cordon between the true Saints and the rest of the population, so that even the houses of the ungodly were like 'so many filthy cages of unclean Birds, so many styes of all manner of abominations'.42 Protestant housewifery reached its culmination in Geneva, and particularly in the Netherlands, where even...
Place Space and Order
In the very earliest periods of human society, grooming was governed only by biology but the next sedimentary layer in the history of personal hygiene was the arrival of human artificial technology. By slow degrees the biological body of early Homo sapiens became refined, retuned, towards a range of new sensory experiences smells, sounds, textures, colours, tastes most of which are now wholly taken for granted, but at the time must have seemed miraculous. They were certainly deeply embedded in...
acknowledgements
I would here like to acknowledge and sincerely thank all those people who have listened, given advice, answered endless strange questions, responded to letters and telephone calls, lent books, read chapters and papers, put up with harangues or monologues and shown kind interest generally, with patience and curiosity, over the years. They know who they are. They certainly include all my supportive friends, and my family. In particular, I would like to thank my supervisors Brian Abel-Smith in...
Neoplatonism
Most of the Church Fathers were soaked in the classics of Roman scholarship St Jerome had to put himself under a special penance to stop himself from reading them. The pagan philosophies themselves were still strong and active. The Alexandrian philosopher Plotinus ad 205-70 had inspired an ascetic, Neoplatonic, or 'gnostic' tradition within the early Christian Church, and his prolific writings on the joys of contemplation lived long after him.14 Plotinus believed that all physical matter was...
chapter 6 medieval morals
From now on we move northwards into western and central Europe to investigate patterns of personal health and hygiene from the medieval period onwards through to what later Europeans triumphantly called the early modern and modern world finally putting the economic and demographic disasters of the fall of Rome well behind them. The 'civilizing process' that seeped through cash-strapped Europe in these medieval and early modern centuries was in effect the slow escalation of domestic luxuries,...
The Senses
The next layer in the body's homeostatic self-defensive response system are the delicately built sense organs, hard-wired into our psyche the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. This is where the psychology of cleansing comes in. The sense organs are the brain's external antennae, connecting the body to the outside world, and it is they that detect all foreign or alterior bodies approaching or entering the organism, and ruthlessly guide our responses. The...
The Olympic Games
The festive Olympic Games were formally instituted in 776 bce and were held once every four years until ad 520.14 They inspired a 'Crown Games' super-league that included the regional Isthmian, Nemean, and Pythian Games, to which all local villages would have sent their champions. Largely owing to their urgent need for strong military muscle, the Greek upper classes vigorously supported popular competitive sports and gradually turned them into a central tenet of society a sort of patriotic test...
Pollution
Distancing yourself from poisons, dust, and dirt is one thing but distancing yourself from invisibly 'unclean' people and objects is quite an achievement of the imagination. Animals maintain certain social boundaries and distances, but they have no conception of a dirt demon. The metaphysical or sacred dimensions of the ger were clearly just as important to its inhabitants as its physical dimensions, which were so carefully arranged to reflect their cosmological beliefs in the workings of the...
The Holy Toilette
The flesh rubbers, kohl pots, rouge pots, lipsticks, razors, and mirrors found in the great water tank and temple courtyard at Mohenjo-Daro 2500 bce are evidence of the very early religious grooming traditions in the Indus valley, a thousand years before the incoming Indo-Aryans re-established a Vedic theocracy which abhorred body dirt.21 In Vedic theology any touch or sight of the prohibited bodily secretions such as sweat, saliva, hair and nail clippings, vomit, urine, blood, sperm, faeces,...