WI: Bathing Remained Popular

Contrary to popular belief, bathing was popular in Medieval Europe. So much so that soap production was an around-the-clock operation in certain countries. Fell out of favor with the Black Death, when pseudoscience said opening pores with bathing had made people more susceptible to disease. Frequent bathing took several centuries to come back. In the 19th century, Queen Victoria boasted of taking a bath once a month even when she did not need to.

What if bathing had never fallen out of favor?
 

Driftless

Donor
Half-tongue in cheek here....

Your comment on bathing falling out of favor during the plague era got me thinking of how to offset that notion....

Natural Flea Repellants

Flea repellent for humans

If you want to make yourself less attractable to fleas to prevent flea bites, you can use flea repellent on your body. Several home ingredients are known to have an effect and garlic is one of them. Fleas don’t like the taste of garlic and that’s why you should eat lots of it, especially if you have a flea infestation at home. This is one of the reasons why some people don’t get flea bites. What you put in your mouth really matters because the ingredients go straight to your bloodlines, and as you know, fleas feed on the blood of their host.



Other ingredients that can prevent fleas from biting you:
  • Lemons
  • Lavender oil
  • Cedar wood oil
  • Eucalyptus oil
  • Peppermint oil
Include some of those avaialable compounds in the routine bath rituals of the era (plus washing of garments in the same....). Would those additions have un-knowingly reduced the sharing of disease carrying fleas?

Some folks love garlic of course, and others despise the odor; but all the rest are relatively pleasant & sometimes stimulating smells to many humans.
 
Contrary to popular belief, bathing was popular in Medieval Europe. So much so that soap production was an around-the-clock operation in certain countries. Fell out of favor with the Black Death, when pseudoscience said opening pores with bathing had made people more susceptible to disease. Frequent bathing took several centuries to come back. In the 19th century, Queen Victoria boasted of taking a bath once a month even when she did not need to.

What if bathing had never fallen out of favor?

Of course bathing was popular in medieval Europe ! There still were public bath until the Church had them closed because they were dens of (sexual) vice. In other words, the public bath in a city was, to a certain extent, a brothel.
 
As far as I understand the problem with bathing (I don't KNOW for sure, but it seems logic to me), the problem was that bathing ban came after roman empire public baths. They were claimed to spread disease, which was absolutely true! If a number of people swim in WARM, non-chlorinated water, it would only cause all bacteria and viruses those people carry on their skin bloom and spread.
Mechanism of disease spreading was completely unclear. Bacteria and viruses were unknown, and even unimaginable.
Also to have really clean water for bath you need first to boil it and then let it cool down to usable temperature. Mixing it with unboiled water would most likely cause all bacteria multiply (and you won't like to have even a tiny scratch on your skin in such situation, as the wound would immediately get infected).

Fats, required for soap production were rare and expensive. People had to hunt for whales for their fat, as they had to have something for illumination. Beeswax for candles wasn’t enough in that meaning.

The last, and most important, boiling water and making soap requires a lot of heat, and that amounts of fuel could only be achieved with mass coal mining . And even after the coal is mined, then it needs to be delivered, and with horse power only, it is a great problem. Only Britain had so much easy accessible coal, short land distances and sea all around.

Of course, all of this is my personal opinion, based more on logic (as far as it is understandable to me) rather than solid historical facts.
I apologize for any grammar or spelling mistakes, English isn't my first language.
 
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