Before Showers: The History of Getting Clean

SPEAKER_02 0:00 Hello and welcome to what we did before. Today we're finding out what we did before showers. Now, if I go one or two days without having a shower, I start to feel gross and things start to smell. You know, and that's just one or two days. Sure, I I go to the gym, but I otherwise have a desk job, so it's not like I'm doing hard labour.

SPEAKER_00 0:21 So it got us wondering, what did we do before showers existed? Access to water hasn't always been so plentiful. The poor, for many generations, would have wanted to save most of it for drinking. So did people just smell?

SPEAKER_02 0:37 Let's take you back to a time when bathing was a lot less common. I'm Ollie.

SPEAKER_00 0:42 And I'm Matt, and this is what we did before, the podcast charting the history of modern inventions.

SPEAKER_02 0:51 Right, so Matt, um, it's pretty clear that the showers that we have now are quite new. But the first mechanical shower actually goes uh back to 1767, which I think I think is quite recent, unexpected to me and at least. So this was invented by William Feetham, who was a uh stovemaker in London. And I mean it's quite amazing that he invented it back then, but you did have to manually pump this thing by hand.

SPEAKER_00 1:19 Well, it kind of sounds like you'd get kind of sweaty just working the thing. That defeats the purpose, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:26 Yeah, exactly. I mean, it did mean that you didn't need servants to fill up like buckets of water and throw them on you anymore. But I guess in those times their labouring was better than your labouring. And that's probably why it didn't catch on with the rich, because I mean you know, it seems like it was much too much like hard work.

SPEAKER_00 1:47 And also, I guess you couldn't pump hot water through the system.

SPEAKER_02 1:51 Yeah, exactly. And so that would have been absolutely freezing. Because I mean, it's pretty miserable having a cold shower now, although actually people are sort of doing cold shower, that that cold shower, cold water thing these days, aren't they?

SPEAKER_00 2:06 Yeah, uh I've tried it myself and I really I really tried to make it a habit because I really like the idea actually of like you start the day achieving something. Like if you did nothing in that day, you got into a cold shower when you didn't want to, and you made yourself do that. I actually think you just go and fester in bed afterwards. Yeah, I yeah, it would it would give me sort of reason to do nothing with the rest of my day. Yeah, I achieved something today, it's fine. But no, I I don't have the uh I I prefer comfort too much. Um yeah, me too.

SPEAKER_02 2:45 Even when I turn off the shower and it it runs cold for a little bit just at the end as you're getting out. I like I asked my back just to stop those like those five cold water droplets from hitting it.

SPEAKER_00 2:57 I know we're so um we're so feeble, especially if we look back at this um mechanical shower, you know, they were having to shower in cold water and it also wasn't clean. Um, so FIFA's shower just recycled the same old dirty water each time, which you know, by today's standards kind of defeats the purpose.

SPEAKER_02 3:21 Yeah, so double double duty on defeating the purpose, you're sweaty um and you're putting your own. It kind of sounds like Faruka territory to me. Um, interestingly, though, in Victorian Britain, cold water bathing was actually sometimes promoted as like morally strengthening, uh particularly in boys' public schools. So cold plunges would have been framed as like character building. Um, so you know, there's the hygiene element, but also that discipline element which you're talking about. So um, you know, some actually even feared hot water as unhealthy and and thought that cold was like virtuous. The Victorian biohackers.

SPEAKER_00 4:02 Yeah. Well, I imagine part of that was also just because it was harder to have hot water, so it's kind of like, you know, have the have the cold water, it's good for you.

SPEAKER_02 4:13 Um yeah, we'll make it sound like really cool.

SPEAKER_00 4:16 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just to make the kids because you were saying that's for like uh kids in boys' public schools, so yeah, you can imagine it's like, oh yeah, it'll put hairs on your chest, just you know, do that. Uh seems to be the excuse that my dad used to always give whenever I he was making me do something I didn't want to do.

SPEAKER_02 4:35 I thought you were gonna say when he was making you have a cold shower.

SPEAKER_00 4:39 Um well, they used to always I mean, not showers but baths. Um my parents used to always tell me, like, if I was like, oh, the bath wasn't very nice today or whatever, they'd say, Oh, we used to have a tin bath in front of the fire and we used to all have to share the water. D did your parents ever say this to you?

SPEAKER_02 4:57 Um no, they they didn't actually. I don't think my mum's ever told me about her bathtime habits, which I'm kind of grateful for now. I've said that out loud. Yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_00 5:11 I mean, I don't want to know them now, just to be clear. I'll text her if you like. Yeah, no, but yeah, anyway. Um Matt wants to know. Yeah, what's what's your baths like? Um, where were we? Uh oh yeah, so yes, this 1767 shower. Yeah, so there were sort of iterations after 1767, of course. That's how we managed to get to where we are now. And we'll get back to that a little later, but before we do bring ourselves to the modern era, let's let's find out what bathing was like in the time just before Fetham developed this contraption.

SPEAKER_02 5:54 Yeah, I'm really interested in this because I was watching Polark the other day, um, and I seem to get all of my sort of interest in historical facts from TV shows. So I really need to make sure that I sort uh I check the history before I go and write any of these scripts because they are often dramatized, and it's kind of a bit of a sad revelation, really, that my whole life is just like guided by what I've seen on TV. But anyway, the point is in Polark, Ross, the main character, he was making his maid scrub herself in a bucket of water outside. Um, and she was like common folk from a poor family, and uh essentially what he was trying to do was get rid of her knits. Um he called them crawlers. I don't know if that's what they did call them back in Cornwall in the 1700s, but yeah, he was saying, I'm getting rid of your crawlers. And it got it got me thinking, like, um, was that just super common that people just had knits all the time? And actually, in in a lot of the series as well, pretty much anyone except lords and ladies seemed to have dirty black nails. Um, and they kind of make a thing of it, they they zoom up on those dirty nails. Like I don't know what point they're trying to prove, but anyway, they do. And I just wondered, is this is Poldark a true representation of what cleanliness was like back in the UK back then?

SPEAKER_00 7:11 Well, the stereotype sort of says yes. The medieval and early modern Europe was one long festival of BO.

SPEAKER_02 7:23 That's a grim festival. That is actually what most festivals are, to be fair. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:27 If you've ever been to like Reading or Download. I have fond or maybe not so fond memories of uh Download with you, Ollie.

SPEAKER_02 7:34 Um the intention there is not to shower, yeah, um, is to avoid showering at all costs. But but the thing is, um, that isn't true. So that stereotype of uh smelly people from the past, um, you know, people obviously didn't shower daily because showers didn't exist, but they did wash, of course. But in the in the 1700s, most people would do what was called a basin wash. So you may have done this growing up if you were short of time or whatever, but you get a bowl and a cloth, you wash your face, your hands, your armpits, all the important bits. Um, I called them sink washes, actually. But if you were to do like a full-body immersion bath, for instance, that was a lot rarer. Um, because you know, heating water back then was expensive, but cleanliness still mattered, uh, particularly if you could see it, if it was visible.

SPEAKER_00 8:25 So, yeah, you might not always soak in a bath, but you weren't people weren't completely ignoring hygiene, right?

SPEAKER_02 8:32 Yeah, exactly. But interestingly, um after the Black Death, public bathhouses in Europe uh fell out of favour. So there were a number of reasons for this. There were some moral concerns regarding prostitution, but otherwise, um, there was also a a growing belief that hot water opened the pores and like let disease in. So you've got this kind of paradox where people were bathing less, not out of laziness, but because they thought it was healthier. Inviting the Black Death back then.

SPEAKER_01 9:03 Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:05 Yeah, a lot of these decisions seem to sort of be counter to what they're trying to achieve.

SPEAKER_00 9:10 Yeah. But they also changed their linen because cleanliness wasn't about sort of scrubbing your skin, it was about clean underclothes. And people believed that linen absorbed sweat and dirt from the body. So if your shirt was fresh, they thought, you know, you're clean. Um, so you sort of deodorized with laundry.

SPEAKER_02 9:35 Yeah, uh basically. And and that wasn't just like something that the poor did. Even wealthy households didn't immerse themselves in baths that often. You know, full baths were heavy, they were labour-intensive operations, you needed gallons of heated water, which would have been carried upstairs by servants. So, you know, the rich might bathe slightly more often, but definitely not daily.

SPEAKER_00 9:58 Yeah, that's very important to note that for most of history, washing just took effort. It required fuel, labour, time, coordination. People, myself included, sometimes moan if you spend sort of ten minutes in the shower, but ten minutes is very, very efficient by historical standards.

SPEAKER_02 11:23 Yeah. If you wanted a proper bath in the 1700s, you weren't just like stepping into hot water and then zoning out. First, you had to get the water, which might mean walking to a pump or a well or maybe a stream, you carry it back in heavy buckets, and then you'd need a lot of it. Uh, you know, a bath isn't a kettle, you're talking dozens of litres. Then you'd have to heat it over a fire, which kind of goes back to what you said about your dad and uh placing the tin bath in front of the fire. But you know, a fire isn't free either. You've got to light it, you've got to tend it, you're gonna burn that fuel which you might actually want to use for other things, since firewood uh wasn't infinite, and then coal as well cost money. So already this is like this is a major event to have a heated bath. And then even then, you know, once the water's hot enough, depending on where you heated it, you might have to carry it upstairs, try not to spill it. Um, then you've got to pour it into a portable tub, which might just be set up in your bedroom. Uh it's not ideal if you spill that all over your bedroom floor. And if you're in household with several people, this is exactly what you were saying about your dad. The water would have, you know, could have been reused. So you put the cleanest person in first. I'm not sure how you decide. Uh, and then the next cleanest, and then the next until you get to like some poor buggers like dirty already, and then there's bathing in in really rancid bath water and just remains dirty.

SPEAKER_00 12:45 Yeah, I imagine I I would hope that they rotate who the last person is. Like that's the fair way. Like, if you're the one that always has it last, like, geez, I think that you'd have some trauma by the end. Like, am I not worth the clean water? But like the bath itself, obviously, it might not take that long, it might be like, I don't know, 15 minutes or something.

SPEAKER_02 13:13 Yeah, but the preparation it could take hours, right? So and then and then you've got the clearing up afterwards, um, which is more labour, more buckets, emptying it somewhere, making sure you're not flooding the floor. So, you know, it paints a pretty good picture of why full immersion bathing just wasn't something you did every morning before work. Um, I mean, I don't bath now ever. Uh I I shower obviously, although maybe not as frequently as I should. But you know, it really was like occasional, and when they did do it, they really had to plan it and be deliberate about it.

SPEAKER_00 13:48 Yeah. I'm I'm I'm a bather actually. I haven't had a shower for uh quite a while. Um I have had a bath, just to be clear. Um but uh no, I I love it for I'm just gonna clip that one bit out where you just say I haven't had a shower in quite a while. While I'm like scratching myself like uh but the reason, of course, is as we've said, you know, we have the luxury, I can run a bath um with effectively unlimited hot water. Yeah, it costs, but it's running, um, in sort of 10 minutes. If it was this kind of ordeal, uh I think I'd skip a few baths. Yeah, definitely. But like going back, surely you you would expect that the rich were kind of cleaner overall, and while they they were cleaner in some ways, they were also dirtier in others. So the wealthy dirty rich. Dirty rich, filthy rich, filthy rich, isn't it? Dirty rich. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's dirt poor and filthy rich, isn't there? Which is interesting. Yeah, there's no clean way to live in capitalism. Yes. Um, where were we? Um so yeah, the the the rich were a bit cleaner in some ways, but they were dirtier in others. So the the wealthy had access to more linen, and as we said, they would wash that. So and they also had servants to wash it, and they had private washstands in their rooms so they could maintain at least a visible cleanliness more easily. But many of them also lived in the cities, and cities were filthy. There were no sewers as we know them, bearing in mind obviously, as industrial kind of the industrialization kind of uh picked up around this time or a little later as well. There was just filth everywhere, chamber pots emptied into the streets, animal waste, there was contaminated water supplies. You get the picture. So a rural labourer living near a stream might actually rinse more frequently than a London merchant breathing coal soot.

SPEAKER_02 16:14 Yeah, and actually that reminds me of what Nicola Twilley said in our episode about fridges where animals were walked to slaughter, and so the streets of London were filled of the smell of these sort of like animal carcasses and or these living animals which were being, you know, about to be killed. And you know, it did it did sound like cities were quite grotty places, and and that was where the rich congregated. And we'll actually get into the great stink of London later on this note. But yeah, it does seem that countryside poor might smell less than urban rich. But to be honest, nobody expected people to smell like nothing, which is a bit of a mindset shift from today. You know, I think today clean means scless or like neutral, uh maybe artificially fragranced, but in the 1700s, human smell, like the smell of just being a human, was normal. You were expected to smell like somebody who's been alive all day.

SPEAKER_00 17:16 Yeah, this is another thing that's interesting to me. I've just I've just got a dog, and I accept totally that he has this dog smell. Um but but if if a human moved in and they they just smelt like this, I would not accept it whatsoever. And um maybe we should give ourselves the benefit of the sort of animalist.

SPEAKER_02 17:41 Yeah, like they they pong as well, like it's really quite vile, and yet we like bring them into our homes, we love them, we cuddle them, we let people let them lick their faces. It makes me wonder whether like uh other animals care so much about the stinkiness. Well, obviously, smell matters in the wild, but the stinkiness, like the more visceral, sort of disgusting type of smell that we think of, whether that's even an experience in the animal world.

SPEAKER_00 18:11 That's a very interesting question because again, the dog example, you see them just like sniffing, and they have a very strong sense of smell compared to us, and they will put their face right up to like some poo and take a big whiff of it. And they don't, you know, if we did that, we'd probably throw up. So, why don't they have that disgust feeling uh when it comes to smells that humans do? I wonder if it's something that we've just learnt or it's cultural or or what. So in the 1700s, you you were expected to smell like a human, like you said, and the goal wasn't sort of odor elimination, it was odor management. They might have used herbs or scented gloves and perfumed handkerchiefs, anything to just manage the stench. Um, so they weren't really worried about sort of a total absence of smell like we are now.

SPEAKER_02 19:10 Yeah, and you know, this feeling that you're smelly or unhygienic if you don't shower every single day is is really quite new. Um, and I and I think it's probably thanks to some advertising. Um, so there were some deodorant campaigns um like that really hyped up this 20th century smell anxiety. So you have soap brands like Life Boy, they they heavily marketed fear of BO in the early 1900s, uh, and it apparently even linking BO to the risk of job loss.

SPEAKER_00 19:44 Well, yeah, that might actually have become a self-fulfilling prophecy because I can kind of imagine that now, but in the early 1900s, maybe not. So before big foods, there was kind of there was big soap.

SPEAKER_02 19:59 Big soap, yeah. There were actually other early 20th century adverts as well that basically tell women that they'll be socially rejected if they smell, which is just uh it it's bizarre. And uh soap, you know, this all ties in with the fact that soap became dramatically more accessible in the 19th century. So in Britain, soap had been taxed heavily, making it quite expensive. But when the tax was repealed uh in 1853 and industrial chemical processes made production cheaper, soap became more affordable for far more people. And you know, that changes behaviour because once soap is cheap, regular washing becomes more realistic. Um, but in in the past, you know, washing was about comfort and visible dirt, but then by the time this happens and then these adverts come out, it was I guess about like respectability, what was acceptable socially. And you know, something else important to note, you know, um there is a good chance in all of this that body odour was less intense in the past anyway, because we we eat a lot of crap these days. We've got high sugar processed foods in our diets, we wear synthetic fabrics that trap sweat, and we do uh you know a lot of enclosed indoor living. Whereas people in the 1700s, or maybe more so hunter-gatherers, if we're really thinking about it this way, but like hunter-gatherers, so ancient humans, they would have eaten a lot of high fibre, like low-processed diets, of course, and they lived out outdoors. So, all in all, it's possible they produced a less intense odour because they had like the constant airflow as well, reducing the smell concentration. You wouldn't have really smelt it much much unless you got like a big gust of wind.

SPEAKER_00 21:43 Yeah. I'm I'm sure the smells were different as well. Um, yeah, I think the diet makes a big difference, and also maybe whether people treated certain diseases and things like that that now we do treat, and you know, those things if they have like open source and stuff like that. But it's all speculative. We can't sniff the armpits of a caveman. Uh I wish I could. It's one of my fetishes. Yeah, it would be something to um yeah, talk about at a dinner party or something, you know. I won't sniff the armpits of a caveman. I think you'd be it's a conversation starter. You'd be swiftly escorted out. Yeah, that might be fine if you're not really a fan of the company. But it but anyway, what you're saying does sort of make sense, but if we go back to Polarc, um what you said about the dirty nails and the uh the lice and the maid scrubbing in a bucket, is is all of that accurate, or is it just sort of TV shorthand for you know, these people are poor? Let's start with the nails. So if you're a labourer in 18th century Cornwall and you were farming or mining or hauling. Your hands would be permanently rough, as many manual labourers today, of course. So you would have embedded dirt under your nails, and that wasn't because you never washed, but because manual work literally would grind the soil into your skin. There's no nail brushes, no sort of industrial soaps, no moisturisers to release the dirt and soften the skin. So yeah, the grimy, visible hands were pretty realistic for working class people, but that doesn't mean that they never cleaned them.

SPEAKER_02 23:36 Yeah, and and then if we move on to the lice, so head lice were extremely common, but that was across all classes, not just the poor. So even um aristocrats dealt with lice. And we have records of um fine-toothed ivory combs specifically designed to remove them. So, you know, knit combs weren't a sign of you the fact that you were poor, they were just like a normal everyday grooming tool back then. Why were lice so common back then? There are probably loads of reasons, but you know, people shared bedding. They lived in close quarters and they didn't have modern chemical treatments if they did have them to get rid of the knits, and obviously regular washing alone doesn't eliminate lice. Um, and even today, you know, clean kids get lice at school, so it's not necessarily about how clean you are. So a maid having knits around this time is totally plausible. Uh, the maid in this has a dog as well, and so I don't know if that makes a difference, but you know, a lord or lady could have had knits easily too back in the 1700s. Um actually, you know, some people in the higher classes wore wigs back then, mostly as a status symbol, but it did also mean they could shave their heads to avoid lice. And then if they did get lice in light in their wig, they could just sort of boil or scrub them or you know get them off that way.

SPEAKER_00 24:58 That's really handy actually. Removable hair that you can just like chuck in the wash, basically. Yeah, you're gonna be getting a wig for the next episode. Yeah, well, thankfully I don't have uh lice to worry about. Um but you're right, but um nowadays at least, people you said it was very common back then. I remember back at school that um the idea of having lice was like, oh, you're dirty. And that's really quite unfair. Um, and I think it might also come down a little bit to a similar kind of thing to what you were talking about before about how our attitudes towards these things have changed. And really, yeah, it's it's no sign of whether you're clean or dirty. So Poldark's maid, she may have had dirty nails and lice, but so might someone upstairs, the rich, cleaner peoples. But when you look at urban poverty in the 18th and especially 19th century, it really was grim. You had overcrowding, shared water pumps, contaminated wells, no or little sewage infrastructure, and that's where you see sustained filth. Sustained filth.

SPEAKER_02 26:16 That sounds like a band name. Band name. Yeah, yeah. Um and it is hard for us to imagine just how overwhelming industrial cities could be. You know, this wasn't just a faint whiff of something unpleasant. Like London in the 19th century had had opened sewers, slaughterhouses, tanneries, coal smoke hanging in the air, and tens of thousands of horses producing enormous amounts of manure every single day. So the smell wasn't subtle. Um, it was kind of part of the structure of the city, so it was constant. But now let's rewind a little bit further. So before bathhouses, uh before plumbing, before cities, what about ancient humans and hunter-gatherers? So we've sort of alluded to them a little bit before, but I have always found it very interesting that we need to shower and bathe to get clean because I watched my cat the other day, you know, she's she just licks herself and she's sorted, she licks herself clean. And I I am pretty confident whatever licking that she's doing is is doing a pretty good job because she seems to be clean without ever touching water.

SPEAKER_00 27:21 That's a good point, and cats are pretty averse to water as well. Animals do tend to have some way of self-grooming. Um, a lot of them do anyway, um, but we need or we seem to want external intervention to make ourselves clean. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 27:40 So were ancient humans just filthy a lot of the time without that ability to self-clean and they just had to sort of wait for water to become clean. Or or was it that, you know, were they picking through each other's hair and taking lysen bits of debris out for one another like primates do? Well, actually, you know, some animals they roll about in dust, uh, some mammals do, to kind of clean parasites off. So I sort of wondered whether there was a mixture of that going on or whether it really was that they just had to wait for water.

SPEAKER_00 28:13 Well, yeah, it maybe that might be the case for the hairy bits, uh, but humans aren't covered in in fur, so it doesn't really translate as much as kind of, you know, uh a bonobo or something like that. Instead, what we have that a lot of animals don't is we we sweat quite a lot. And in fact, we're one of the sweatiest species on earth. Sounds like an insult. Some of the yeah, yeah, some people more than others. Uh I might use that one at some point. You're the sweatiest species of human on earth. Um but this sweat, this ability to sweat is actually part of how we evolved to run long distances. Um, so what this means is that early humans would have noticed the discomfort of grime. And obviously, if you live near rivers, lakes, and streams, which a lot of settlements did, you would bathe. So anthropologists studying modern hunter-gatherer groups find regular washing in rivers and lakes as something that was quite common, and it seems like it was practical rather than just, you know, like ritualized.

SPEAKER_02 29:30 Okay, so early humans probably weren't caked in prehistoric sludge.

SPEAKER_00 29:36 No, uh apart from those that had fallen in bogs, as we've touched on in the fridge. Um But it if if if anything, um living outdoors with access to fresh water might have meant that they had they were more frequently rinsing than someone in the 17th century in a sort of cramped city with questionable wells. And you don't need to have developed germ theory to know that it's important to wash. I mean, obviously, it just feels bad to be dirty, first of all. And I don't believe that that is something that we have learnt. I think, you know, from society and from marketing, I think it's just something inherent to us. Not to mention parasites, ticks, fleas, dirt, they're all visible and you can feel them as well. So in in small tight-knit groups, smelling awful all the time, it also isn't sort of a socially fine thing most of the time.

SPEAKER_02 30:43 Yeah, exactly. So you still had the pressure of the group, um, even if they didn't know what germs were. Um, so that yeah, maybe they didn't wash every day, but especially you know, if water was scarce or if it was freezing cold, you could imagine that they weren't like running to the nearest river in the middle of winter. Maybe the group was migrating, for instance, as well. They could have been moving away from water, so washing frequency dropped then, but they they just weren't living in dense cities filled with sewage, they didn't have all this air pollution that we have to deal with now. So paradoxically, you know, you could argue that a hunter-gatherer with occasional river washes could have had fewer hygiene-related diseases than a 19th-century factor factory worker surrounded by contaminated water. It is it's feasible, right?

SPEAKER_00 31:29 Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. I mean, we were all a lot closer to each other as well in these cities. Um, so there's a lot of factors that means that cleanliness isn't just sort of how often you wash, but the environment plays like a really big part in that.

SPEAKER_02 31:48 Well, let's step forward now to the first great civilization. So let's go back to Mesopotamia, what's now modern-day Iraq. And we're looking around 3000 BCE now, because this is where the idea that ancient people didn't care about cleanliness really starts to fall apart.

SPEAKER_00 32:04 Yeah, archaeologists have found clay tablets from this region that describe recipes for soap-like substances. They were mixing animal fats with salts, like alkaline salts derived from ashes. They didn't know that they were performing a chemical reaction called saponification, but that's exactly what it was. You combine fats with an alkali and you get something that lifts grease and dirt from skin. So they weren't just rinsing off in a river and calling it a day, um, which would have been totally fair for the technology of the time, really, but they were actively manufacturing cleansing agents thousands of years before the Romans built their famous baths.

SPEAKER_02 32:53 Yeah, and washing in Babylon uh wasn't you know just practical, there there were spiritual elements too. So water had deep religious meaning, and it still is today. You've got holy water in churches, and rivers like the Eupharides were sacred sources of water as well. So you know, before entering temples, priests would undergo purification rituals, and that included washing their hands and sometimes their whole bodies. That's really interesting because uh hand washing didn't become super common until relatively recently in history, apart from within um spiritual or religious rituals, and then it was something that was practiced quite often. Um, and there are even some written descriptions of ritual cleansing before uh prayers and ceremonies.

SPEAKER_00 33:39 It's very interesting that it's moved to this really practical thing from like a ritual purification kind of uh thing that people were doing. And just to be clear, Babylon was a city in um Mesopotamia, right?

SPEAKER_02 33:56 Yeah, exactly. Um and I think it's important to note that w when I say fairly recent in terms of hand washing, actually, you know, that that practice as a hygiene practice to prevent disease, it really only began to be understood and adopted in like the mid-19th century. So um that's starting in the mid-1800s, yeah. Uh so yeah, it is interesting that we we had it for so long as this ritual practice, and it was only in fairly recent times. And now I still think the recommendations for how long you have to wash your hands are just off-putting for most people.

SPEAKER_00 34:33 20 seconds of doing I know people only started taking it seriously during COVID, in my opinion. And I think you're right. And I think they've given up on that. At least if you go to um if you're a man and you use a public toilet, I'm sure you've noticed the amount of men that leave cubicles and don't actually wash their hands. So many, yeah, I know. Um, which changed for a bit, I think, just anecdotally. Um, but I've noticed more and more people going back into their old habits. So archaeologically, going sort of in the Mesopotamia region, we can see that this cleaning mattered. So there were excavations at sites like Yore, which is a uh Sumerian city in Mesopotamia, and this revealed homes with dedicated washing areas, and some of the wealthier houses had large clay bathtubs built into courtyards, so water would be poured over the body and then drained away through sort of primitive channels. It wasn't running hot water on demand, obviously, we didn't have boilers, but it was intentionally intentional design. They'd built washing into their domestic architecture, and this was what 3000 BCE?

SPEAKER_02 35:58 Yeah, I mean obviously not everyone was enjoying like regular warm baths, but because water still had to be carried and fuel was needed to heat it. So the poorest people would have washed more practically, still, they would have gone to canals and basins and maybe done like partial washing again. But the key point is this they valued cleanliness enough to make soap to build washing spaces and to ritualise purification, which means when we imagine ancient people as permanently grimy and indifferent to hygiene, we're we're projecting backwards, or we're sort of imagining something that that's just not true. In some ways, parts of the ancient world were probably more structurally invested in washing than later medieval Europe would be.

SPEAKER_00 36:43 I've I've heard this before, um, particularly about Rome, uh, that they were much cleaner with their bathing habits, and this only came back sort of in the last two or three hundred years or so. And I the the more sort of that we've spoken about this topic, the more I can totally see that. What I didn't realize was that it was also the case, you know, far before the Romans. So we're we're talking 3000 BCE, like you said, and if we move west from Mesopotamia into ancient Egypt, cleanliness becomes even more visible to the historical record. So in Egypt, it wasn't just priests who were washing, cleanliness was woven into daily life. The Egyptians, obviously, a lot of them lived along the Nile, which was reliable access to clean water, and that alone changes everything. When a civilization forms around a river that floods predictably every year, then washing becomes much more feasible than in places dependent on wells or rainfall. And they bathed regularly, often in the Nile itself. They had basins in their homes for pouring water over their bodies. What really stands out is how seriously they took personal grooming. So archaeologists have found combs, razors, mirrors, cosmetic jars, ointment containers, and they found them in pretty big numbers. They shaved body hair to reduce lice, something that people were doing far later uh in in history. And priests were required to shave their entire bodies and bathe multiple times a day before entering temples.

SPEAKER_02 38:38 They also they uh developed some early forms of soap as well, made from animal and vegetable oils mixed with alkaline salts. Um, and so you know, this was this was used for washing just like it was in um ancient Mesopotamia, but also for treating skin conditions. So again, we see that same pattern. They they didn't understand bacteria, but they did understand that certain substances made skin cleaner and healthier.

SPEAKER_00 39:04 And then there's perfume as well. Egypt was pretty obsessed with this. They used fragrant oils not just as luxury items, but as part of hygiene. So obviously, pretty hot in Egypt, and in a hot climate, smell matters. And these oils masked body odour, but they also moisturized the skin at the same time. We're not sure how much of that was intentional, but obviously what what's striking is that for many Egyptians, especially outside the very poorest groups anyway, washing wasn't rare and it wasn't unusual, it was pretty expected. Being visibly dirty would have probably stood out.

SPEAKER_02 39:46 Yeah, and then if we move into ancient Greece, something shifts again. So washing becomes tied not just to religion or grooming but to athletic culture, so uh you know, public life. The Greeks, as we know, exercised a lot. They've got the gymnasium, which wasn't like now just a place to lift weights, it was um central really to education and social life. Men would train naked, covered in olive oil like I do, um, and that and that protected them the skin and and it also reduced sun damage. And then after exercise, they didn't necessarily jump into a bath straight away. Instead, what they did was they used a tool called a stridge, which is a curved metal scraper, and they would use the stridgel to scrape off the oil and the sweat and the dirt from their skin.

SPEAKER_01 40:33 Ugh.

SPEAKER_00 40:34 It sounds grim, but um yeah. But actually, I think people maybe do this now when they're like trying to make weight for a um like an MMA fight or something. I think they sweat out as much as possible and scrape off all of the sweat and stuff because they want to just remove it, they don't want to add anything by washing. Um, so yeah, that's interesting. I didn't know people were doing that back then.

SPEAKER_02 41:01 It sounds brutal, yeah, but effective. So you would just go through that whole process, you'd just oil yourself, exercise, scrape it all off, and rinse and repeat, quite literally.

SPEAKER_00 41:12 I can imagine, especially without water, you know, this is a way to remove the the nasty stuff without uh having a requirement for water. So um, but but but they did actually also build public bathhouses, so it wasn't just scraping. Um and these weren't yet the kind of the vast Roman complexes that we picture, but they were they were structured washing spaces, like water could be poured from spouts, and sometimes these were shaped like animal heads, and they created uh like gravity-fed streams that look surprisingly like an early shower.

SPEAKER_02 41:54 And then when we arrive in Rome, so the Romans really turned cleanliness into infrastructure. Bathing in Rome wasn't an occasional ritual or a post-workout rinse, it was uh you know, daily rhythm of life. You've got public bathhouses, the thermae, you know, they were enormous. And we're talking heated floors, which most people don't even have today. Uh they have vaulted ceilings, hot rooms, warm rooms, cold plunge pools, changing areas, um, exercise yards, libraries, even snack stalls. So some of them, you know, could accommodate thousands of people per day. And this wasn't just for the elite. Entrance fees were often cheap. In some periods, they were subsidized or even free. And the engineering behind it was what is what really matters. So aqueducts brought huge quantities of fresh water into cities. And underground heating systems or hypercosts pumped hot air beneath floors to warm the baths. Uh water flowed in, it drained away, and it wasn't recycled sweat water like Feedham 1767 shower. This was constantly replenished.

SPEAKER_00 43:03 Sounds like genuine luxury, even by today's standards.

SPEAKER_02 43:07 Um Yeah, I would love to go to some of those. I bet I bet it was amazing.

SPEAKER_00 43:11 Yeah. Um one thing that's different is that they weren't using soap in the way that we do. So, like the Greeks, Romans often used oil and the stridgel, the scrapers, to scrape off dirt. But the sheer availability of water, especially with this um engineering of the aqueducts, etc., it kind of meant that immersion bathing was just more common than in Greece.

SPEAKER_02 43:39 But it was in ancient Rome where urine was collected from public urinals and taxed under Emperor Vespasian. What? They were taxing urine. Why? Uh because urine contains ammonia, which breaks down Greece, so you had textiles cleaners using it to wash clothes and also uh used for tanning leather, all sorts of very useful things that you could do with urine. Um and then uh eventually, though, as as we know, the Roman Empire falls.

SPEAKER_00 44:11 Yeah, um, and those aqueducts deteriorated, the there was no sort of maintenance on them, and the populations shrank, and with that, the infrastructure that made large-scale bathing possible begins to disappear in Western Europe. But that doesn't mean that everyone stopped washing overnight, people still had rivers and basins, but this public bathing culture just declined in many regions.

SPEAKER_02 44:43 So, when do showers actually become normal in the home? Because William Feetham, yeah, he invented his pump contraption in 1767. But then what? Did everyone just rush out to install a shower?

SPEAKER_00 44:57 No, um, as you can imagine. Uh similarly to the fridges as we spoke about with Nicola Twilley. Not at all. Actually, for most of the 1800s, if you were bathing at home, you're probably still using a bathtub. Showers where they existed were mostly institutional. So like prisons used them, military barracks used them, boarding schools, they were efficient and you could just line people up, you know, wash them quickly and move on. But in private homes, the the bathtub was still kind of the king.

SPEAKER_02 45:35 Yeah, and even in the early 20th century, if you were lucky enough to have indoor plumbing, you probably had a bath rather than a standalone shower because water pressure wasn't great. You had the problem of heating water, which was really slow as well. And culturally, soaking in a bathtub was seen as like the proper way to wash. Um, I mean, when I briefly lived in Christchurch in New Zealand, my wife and I had this house share. Um, and the shower there was horrific. So it would be perfectly hot one second and then freezing cold the next, and it would flip-flop between the two constantly. She so you could never get used to like one temperature. You're like, oh and so um it it was just it was horrible, and it was also really, really weak. Um, so the the water pressure was terrible, and yet now after doing this research, I I I kind of feel quite glad we had even that.

SPEAKER_00 46:32 Yeah, it makes me feel grateful. I uh I had a similar shower growing up, to be honest. We had like a we had a bathtub with just a shower attachment, and there was it was like it just drip on you. Um, and again, uh the the temperature was kind of inconsistent. So I would just be like, oh, okay, I'm just gonna have a bath. Like, so I can totally get why people back then also made the decision to just stick with a bath. If the shower wasn't a good shower, like you know, you imagine what we have now where it's like perfect solid temperature, doesn't run out of hot water because we have like you know, constant hot water rather than having to wait for it to heat up and then running out of it. But anyway, it's it's really after the second world war that things begin to change. So housing expands, plumbing improves, and the boilers get better. Electric showers appear. And by the 60s and 70s, the 1960s and 70s, um, showers were becoming way more common in British homes.

SPEAKER_02 47:42 And then by the 1990s, obviously they're everywhere, which means this daily ritual most of us perform without thinking, you know, stepping under hot running water every morning, has only really been widespread in Britain for about 50 or 60 years. So that's within living memory.

SPEAKER_00 48:00 Yeah. Uh you know, our grandparents likely didn't grow up with a shower, or or at least necessarily didn't grow up with a shower. And our great grandparents almost certainly didn't.

SPEAKER_02 48:12 Okay, so we promised to get into this, but something of note is the great stink of London in 1858, and it sort of accelerated the building of the infrastructure that eventually paved the way for showers. So in 1858, during a hot summer, the River Thames uh became like an open sewer. You had raw human waste from London's rapidly growing population flowing straight into it. The smell was actually so overwhelming that Parliament, sitting right next to the river, reportedly considered relocating. And the crisis forced the government to fund a massive sewage overhaul under the engineer Joseph Basilgett. And Basilget designed an integrated sewer network that diverted waste away from central London, and it was one of the most important public health engineering projects in British history.

SPEAKER_00 49:02 Yeah, and before proper sewers, adding more water into the homes was just dangerous. If you flushed toilets or poured water away, it often went into cesspits or directly into rivers. But once large-scale sewage systems were built, cities could just safely handle much larger volumes of wastewater.

SPEAKER_02 49:26 Exactly. That made indoor plumbing um expansions viable, really. Indoor plumbing enabled indoor bathrooms, indoor bathrooms eventually made showers practical. So the Great Stink didn't make people suddenly want to shower, but it did accelerate the infrastructure that would later allow widespread bathing at home.

SPEAKER_00 49:46 It's interesting also, like London and Paris, both you know, very old capital cities that both have very early sewage infrastructure. They both suffer suffered the same problems with their rivers. Um, the Thames, you you would not still to this day, you would not swim in the Thames. Um and not least because there's like dead bodies and stuff. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, but I think there's this problem, and don't quote me on this, but I think there's this problem that that the sewers are designed in such a way that when there's sort of flooding um or there's too much water that the sewage will backwash into the river um to make sure that it doesn't go to the s into the streets. In Paris, they spent millions, billions, I think, on cleaning the Seine enough for them to swim in it for the Olympics recently. Um and it was still like this was a huge project over years, costing them billions. And it was still and all the swimmers were later referred to as the greatest. Well, the the they they still, I believe it was touch and go for a lot of the events, and I think there were some that had to be cancelled because there was like it was beyond the acceptable amount of um like dangerous bacteria in the same. Oh wow, and it's like you know, imagine you hear that yesterday, and then you're due to swim today, and they're like, Ah, it's just below the threshold, so it's just fine now. Yeah, there's there's there's just under the threshold of like human sewage and uh your thoughts. Don't open your mouth. It's fine. It's so it was around this time of the Great Stink that the hygiene shift was happening in the 1850s to 1870s, when germ theory was emerging thanks to Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and figures like that. Before this, people believed bad smells themselves caused disease, which is the miasma theory.

SPEAKER_02 51:52 Yeah, so ironically, it was the smell of the Thames that helped push sanitation reform, even though smell wasn't the real cause of cholera. And once the sewers were built and clean water's flowing safely into homes, you you get improvements in boilers and then eventually electric showers arrive. Um, and then bathing kind of turns from what was once this, I don't know, mammoth arduous event, and it just becomes like automatic.

SPEAKER_00 52:20 Yeah, it goes from you know, they had to heat the water, they had to potentially carry it upstairs, they didn't want to waste it. It would have taken a long time to heat that quantity of water, and now you can just turn a tap. Modern showers compressed all of that kind of invisible labour into a flick of the wrist. You don't think about the reservoir, the treatment plant, the boiler, the sewer network. All you experience is like 10 minutes. And even then, someone outside is knocking on the door saying, Are you nearly done? Yeah, I know. But like historically speaking, that 10-minute shower is just absurdly luxury luxurious. It's not even the kings and queens of the time would have been able to experience this. And it doesn't crucially require you to share the water with like three siblings or more, you know. So when you say you feel gross after like a day or two of no showering, I really should just be grateful it's so easy to have a shower these days at all. Yeah, it's something that we probably should appreciate a little more, a bit like fridges, as we saw with our episode with Nicola Twille. It's kind of like hidden or invisible uh uh infrastructure that we don't really appreciate. And and maybe that's something to remember the next time you step under your shower. Thank you very much for listening to what we did before. I'm Matt. And I'm Ollie.

SPEAKER_02 53:54 Please subscribe to the show, it really helps us out, and we will see you next time.