The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [35]
The French essayist Michel de Montaigne, for one, regretted the demise of the bath, but he spoke of it, at the end of the sixteenth century, as a thoroughly dead practice. “In general I consider bathing healthful,” he wrote, “and believe that we incur no slight disadvantages to our health for having lost this custom … of washing our body every day. And I cannot imagine that we are not much the worse for thus keeping our limbs encrusted and our pores stopped up with dirt.” But encrusted limbs and clogged pores remained not just the norm, but the goal. The reigning medical authorities remained faithful to the medieval belief that blocked pores, in particular, sealed the body off from infection. And infection lay in wait all over Europe, as plagues recurred through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One hundred thousand Londoners died in the Great Plague of 1665. A third of Stockholm’s population perished in the plague of 1710–11, as did half the population of Marseilles in 1720–21.
FIT FOR A QUEEN
Elizabeth I received a New Year’s Day present from Mistress Twist, the court laundress: “four tooth-cloths [for rubbing the teeth clean] of coarse Holland wrought with black silk and edged with bone lace.” Her Majesty was also given gold toothpicks, and she owned a gold ear-pick, decorated with rubies.
Even when the plague was not imminent, the fear of water that dated from the late Middle Ages became more and more generalized. Doctors believed that baths threatened the body in various, bewildering ways. “The bath, except for medical reasons when absolutely necessary, is not only superfluous, but very prejudicial to men,” the French doctor Théophraste Renaudot warned in 1655. “Bathing fills the head with vapors. It is the enemy of the nerves and ligaments, which it loosens, in such a way that many a man never suffers from gout except after bathing.”
Mindful of these dangers, the English philosopher and essayist Francis Bacon (1561–1626) designed a twenty-six-hour bath that would limit the penetration of the body by the bad, or “watery,” part of the exercise while encouraging its “moistening heate and virtue.” He achieved this delicate balance, or so he believed, first by sealing the body with oil and salves before immersion. Then the bather sat in the water for two hours. Emerging, he wrapped himself in a waxed cloth impregnated with resin, myrrh, pomander and saffron, which was intended to close the pores and harden the body, which had grown soft in the water. After twenty-four hours, the bather removed the cloth and applied a final coat of oil, salt and saffron.
In Bacon’s extraordinary recipe, water is something to be used reluctantly and with elaborate precautions, but at least it does play a part. More often, particularly in the seventeenth century, water was avoided altogether, except for a cursory washing of hands. The mouth might be rinsed quickly, and the face wiped with a dry cloth. The head and hair should be washed “only with the greatest caution,” according to Jean Liebault, the author of a popular French work about the beautification of the body first published in 1582 and reprinted in 1632. Instead of washing, he recommended that before bed the hair be rubbed with bran or powder, which would be removed in the morning with a comb.
ADVICE FOR THE PRIVY
Fair nasty nymph, be clean and kind And all my joys restore By using paper still behind And spunges for before.
—“Song,” John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ca. 1680
What was visible needed attention, but only what was visible. Beginning in the sixteenth century, manuals of etiquette and health echoed the medieval handbooks’ emphasis on washing the hands and face, but omitted their instructions for bathing the body. The modern scholar Daniel Roche studied a hundred