The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [33]
LETTER FROM FRANCE
“The women here are rather dirty, frequently with some itch on the hands and several other kinds of filth; but to make up for this, they have pretty faces, lovely flesh and are charming when they speak; besides they are very willing to be kissed, touched and embraced.”
—From Guido Postumo to Isabella d’Este, 1511
In 1348, Philippe VI of France asked the medical faculty of the University of Paris to investigate the origins of the plague. Their far-reaching Opinion began with a disastrous conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars that caused disease-infected vapours to rise out of the earth and waters and poison the air. Susceptible people breathed in the noxious air, became ill and died. Who was susceptible? Some of the risks had been recognized in Greek and Roman times: obesity, intemperance, an over-passionate spirit. Now the professors added a new one that struck fear into medieval hearts—hot baths, which had a dangerously moistening and relaxing effect on the body. Once heat and water created openings through the skin, the plague could easily invade the entire body.
For the next two hundred years, whenever the plague threatened, the cry went out: “Bathhouses and bathing, I beg you to shun them or you will die.” Even so, some resisted the idea. In 1450, during an outbreak, when Jacques Des Pars, the physician to Charles VII, called for the closing of the Paris baths, he succeeded only in infuriating the bathhouse owners, and he fled to Tournai. But by the first half of the sixteenth century, it was understood that French baths would be closed during an eruption of the plague. “Steam-baths and bath-houses should be forbidden,” the royal surgeon Ambroise Paré wrote in 1568, voicing a now common opinion, “because when one emerges, the flesh and the whole disposition of the body are softened and the pores open, and as a result, pestiferous vapour can rapidly enter the body and cause sudden death, as has frequently been observed.” Sadly, the best medical advice of the day probably doomed many people, for the dirtier people were, the more likely they were to harbour Pulex irritans, the flea now believed to have carried the plague bacillus from rats to humans.
A SAINT AT THE BATHHOUSE
The infant Thomas of Aquinas (ca. 1225–74) accompanied his mother to the baths in Naples, carried by his wet nurse. Unable to pry open the baby’s clenched fist, the nurse was forced to bathe and dress him without loosening his fist. When they reached home, the mother forced his little hand open in spite of his tearful protest and discovered that the future saint was holding a prayer to the Blessed Virgin.
The alarming image of a body under siege had long-lasting consequences. Even when a plague did not threaten, the porosity of the body made water a threat to the bather, who might contract syphilis or diseases as yet unknown and unnamed, or even become pregnant from sperm floating in the bathwater. Not only could bad things enter the body through water, but the all-important balance of the four humours could also be upset through pores opened by moisture. Worries about the body’s vulnerability affected fashion as well as hygiene. Since the pores might be vulnerable even when dry and not heated, clothing should be smooth, tightly woven and fitted—taffeta and satin for the wealthy, oilcloth and jute or hemp sacking for the poor. Cotton and wool were too loosely woven, and fur offered too many places for poisons to lodge. As plagues recurred somewhere in Europe almost every year until the beginning of the eighteenth century, these fears about a too permeable anatomy remained common currency for some 350 years.
François I closed