The History of Baths

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History of Soap Introduction - Part 2

The early Greeks and Romans did not use soap, as a lotion, they bathed for aesthetic reasons. They used a method of friction with sand, clay pumice or ashes to cleanse their skin and then anointed themselves with oil. The resulting sludge was wiped of with a strigil, a piece of metal. The skin was anointed with healing salves made from fresh herbs after the process. They washed their clothes in streams and rivers but did not use soap. The ancient Germans and Franks record discovering soap, made of tallow and ashes, and as well as a cleansing agent, they dyed their hair red.

The first of the famous luxury Roman baths, with plumbed water from aqueducts, was built about 312 B.C. By the second century A.D., the Greek physician, Claudius Galen, recommended soap for medicinal and cleansing purposes.

After the fall of Rome in 467 A.D. there was a distinct disinclination to bathe, and much of Europe suffered ill health because of diseases made worse by unsanitary conditions. The lack of personal cleanliness contributed heavily to the great plagues of the middle ages, and especially to the Black Death of the 14th century. It was not until the 17th century that cleanliness and bathing started to come back into fashion in much of Europe.

Outside of Europe bathing was not as unpopular, daily bathing remained the custom in Japan. In Iceland, the hot water pools were a gathering place for social activities. In the Eastern Mediterranean and the Byzantine Empire, soap was being manufactured and used. Soap making was revived in Spain as the country was under the influence of Moorish rule in the ninth Century, and the Arabs bathed. All the soaps exported from Italy, Spain, were manufactured from olive oil, and they were superior in quality to the British equivalent, all soap in the Northern Europe was made from tallow fat or fish oils. Both of these produced an adequate soap for textiles and materials, but not surprisingly they were not popular for bathing. The trade in olive oil soap began to emerge and the Southern European soaps were known as Castile soaps.

There were Public bathing houses In England generally called “stews”, ironically they were closed during the times of the plague, because they were thought to spread the plague the people during the Renaissance preferred to mask their smell with heavy Oriental perfumes rather than cleanse it. The fact that soap was a valuable commodity in the 17th and 18th centuries even though the idea of bathing was not popular, had it not have been the people of the colonies in Australia and America would not have gone to such great lengths to manufacture it.

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