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| Public Bathing (Unlikely 17th Century tho but a good pic) |
I grew up in
an engineering family and worked many years for Boeing. There, great flying
machines are built that can stay in the air for literally hours and hours and
can jet halfway around the world without refueling. This is well engineered
stuff.
With that in
mind, I’ve always considered the human body a high maintenance machine. It is
fragile and can’t take much without breaking down. It must regenerate for
literally half its shelf-life. It requires hours of upkeep, always needs wiping
down or, over the years, completely submersed in water with gallons of soap.
The fueling of the human body is a constant thing, with a prodigious amount of
venting waste. This turns out to be an expensive, never ending maintenance slog.
Who would
have thunk this a good design? Not me. I’d really like a conversation with the
designer and tell him my thoughts on how the human body could be improved. But
with that conversation unlikely, I’ll have to stew over the poor engineering.
Let’s take
one of the above items for discussion. Bathing. Keeping clean. It’s a constant
thing, but until fairly recently, not much was done about it. You see
historical portraits of men and women who don’t smile. They are dressed in
their finest ‘Let-us-go-to-church-outfits.’ They look clean, but in reality,
were they?
I’d call
myself a historian, mainly London during the 1660’s, but through research, I’ve
ventured beyond and prior to those years. During my reading, I only once came
across the process of bathing. Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary of his wife’s
thoughts on the subject, who considered it might be a good thing.
Once born,
no one was ever truly naked, again. When you see paintings of naked men and
women, it is fantasy. Men and women were considered naked when they wore only a
thin muslin dressing gown or shift. Men’s shirts were long and covered their
sensitive parts. Drawers were coming into favor but mostly women did not wear
any type of undies. Their sleeping, going about the day shift was a
multi-tasked garment.
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| Bathing Back in the Day |
If one
immersed in water, he or she wore the shift. No soap touched that part of the
body. When one began a new day, he or she might splash water on their faces and
again at night, but little else. Bowls of water were on the table for greasy
hands. When they went to the bathroom, there was no toilet paper. People used
their hands, clumps of moss, damp rags, etc. Household refuse and old water
were cast out the window or door to molder in the street.
Soap was
available but in potash liquid form. Common bar soap wasn’t invented until
somewhere in the 19th century. Clothes that resided against the skin,
i.e., shirts, chemises, shifts, stockings, bed linens were washed and hung to
dry on rails or on hedgerows. One text I read said women would dump up to a
pound of soap in a caldron to wash clothes. Even after rinsing, surely the
fabric would be stiff with soap residue.
Silks,
brocades, or woolen clothing would be brushed and worn until they were stiff with
dirt. If they were still usable, they’d be sold to a seconds clothing merchant
or given to the rag boy.
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| Bathing in the Thames amongst boats and whatnots |
There were
waterworks on the north side of London Bridge that pumped water into a few of
the wealthier houses (obnoxiously loud and bulky, especially during the tidal
flows). There were two conduits for water (on great occasions they ran with
wine), one small and the other much larger, along Cheapside Street where you
could dip your buckets, but most of the time water-boys dragged water up the
London hills to homes from the Thames River, a waterway fouled with human waste
and rubbish, sometimes a dead body or other animals.
So, even if
you tried to remain clean, it was pretty much an impossibility next to what we
expect in today’s hygiene. It would be like smearing a wet dirty cloth over a smudged
and sweaty arm.
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| Nits Anyone? |
Men and
women wore their hair long. During the 1660’s King Charles II (whose hair was
thinning and started to go grey) emulated his rival, Louis XIV and began to
wear periwigs. Everyone who was anyone followed suit. Since there was no
shampoo, hair and periwigs rarely got washed, and if any sort of soap was used,
it made hair sticky. Instead, hair and periwigs filled with nits that turned
into lice. Body wrinkles, folds, filled with dirt and body lice. Sores
developed and became infected. If they went septic, the person died.
People
stank. They covered this stink not
with soap and water but perfumes. They shook pomanders filled with perfumes and
spices (expensive). They chewed mint for bad breath. They walked down streets
riddled with piles of stinking rubbish. Contents from chamber pots would be
cast into the streets crowded with pedestrians.
I say, if an
extraterrestrial species drifted near in their spaceship, they would smell earth
before ever seeing our planet. That’s probably why they only monitor our radio
frequencies and don’t make actual contact.
And that is
why I consider our bodies a poorly constructed machine where we should get our
money back from the manufacturer.
The End.
~*~*~*~
Many thanks to Wikicommons, Public Domain
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