Evolution Of The Shower:
The Everyday Tale Of Plumbing, Heating And Power
Part 2
Early Christians associated bathing with vanity and they avoided it to be more holy. St. Francis of Assisi listed dirt as one of the symbols of a holy person, St. Catherine of Siena avoided washing, and St. Agnes, who died at the age of 13, had never had to take a bath.
During the dark ages, cleanliness was not the fashion of the day in Europe, it did not regain its popularity until almost a half of its population was decimated by the plague. In Tudor times Queen Elizabeth 1 popularised baths when she added the first bathroom to her residence Windsor Castle.
As recently as 1812, bathing was looked upon as frivolous and a waste of time. When the Lord Mayor of London requested a simple shower bath in the mansion house, he was turned down by the Common Council on the grounds that no one had ever wanted one before. It would take 20 more years before one would be installed.
Modern showers, without the long-suffering pouring servants, got their first patent in 1767 granted to a William Feetham. The first showers’ not only freed the servants, but also changed the level of water consumption, and they became popular because a small hand pump accompanied them.
Frank Muir in “An Irreverent and Almost Complete Social History of the Bathroom," reported that showers had advantages, they were more compact, and they were cheaper to install. With showers, the need for servants was not dispensed with. In fact, the servant had a wider area to clean, as in the bathroom floor; however, as at least part of the water went down the plughole they had less wastewater to carry away in the bucket, which was still a prerequisite of the shower.
However, these showers used cold water and not surprisingly, that fact alone was sufficient to keep the rich in baths until the advent of piped hot water. Granted the tub of water was also not hot, but the rich had the ever useful servants to run up and down the stairs with the hot water. It may not have been ultimate luxury but there was no way that the overhead tank for the first patented showers could have had hot water.
During Victorian times, the water cures were popularised by Doctors when they advocated taking the water in hydrotherapeutic clinics. The power of water as a medical cure had been acknowledged for over a thousand years. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, was born on the island of Cos around 460 B.C. He wrote of the relaxing power of hot water, and the stimulant properties of cold. Paulus Aegineta, the Seventh Century doctor wrote the sum total of the world’s medical knowledge in the encyclopaedia “Medical Compendium” in Seven Books. He was a hydrotherapist, he applied cold poultices to relieve sunstroke and anuria.
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