• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 755 0

“a sort of medieval innocence was retained.” The German, Austrian and Swiss bathhouse owners and their customers confronted the usual fears about contagion and the intermittent squalls of outrage at the sins of the flesh that were encouraged behind bathhouse doors. Just as AIDS sparked the belief among some religious groups that the disease was a punishment for sexual immorality, many people saw the plague as divine retribution for sinful behaviour, which included bathhouse behaviour. But in Germany, worries about the plague worked in favour of the baths as well as against them: bathing, sweat cures and bleeding, all of which took place in bathhouses, were popular therapies during epidemics. In some towns, separate areas in the bathhouses were established to treat those suffering from the “French disease” (syphilis) or other ills. Vienna, Frankfurt and Bamberg, as well as other towns, closed their baths during epidemics, but others remained open.

The Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) forced the closing of many German baths, and some never reopened. But others did, like the bathhouse in Heidenheim, which rescued its equipment from the ruins of the war, rebuilt and opened its doors again in 1652. The dwindling supply of firewood was a more permanent problem. Bathhouses were voracious consumers of wood, and until early in the sixteenth century the upper bathhouse in Winterthur used about 30 cubic metres a day from the municipal forest. Once the shortage of wood made it necessary for the baths to buy their fuel, the owners—who were not allowed by law to raise their entrance fees—were forced to close on certain days and to charge regular fees for children in order to stay in business. By 1557, in Gerolzhofen, parents had to pay even for babes in arms. The bathhouses in Basel illustrate the difficulty of surviving when firewood became scarce. In the fifteenth century, the city supported fourteen baths; by 1534, there were seven; at the beginning of the seventeenth century, six; and by 1805, only one remained. In spite of all these vicissitudes, many German bathhouses persisted, particularly in conservative mountain regions, where the peasants remained devoted to the baths as well as the traditional remedies associated with them.

Even outside the German-speaking countries, people did not avoid water altogether. Men of all classes swam or waded in rivers and lakes when the weather permitted, as did some women. Swimming in rivers was a favourite pastime of the Spanish. At a time when soap was a rare luxury, the same word was used for bathing and swimming in several European languages (in English, the terms swimming suit and bathing suit are still synonymous), and “bathing” in a natural body of water was as close as most people came to all-over washing. Many Europeans still heeded the superstition—a relic from pre-Christian beliefs about the summer solstice—that an open-air bath on the feast of St. John the Baptist (June 24) would protect them from numerous maladies in the coming year. When Thomas Platter, a Swiss studying medicine in Montpellier, went to see the crowds plunge into the sea on the eve of the feast, in 1596, he reported an “astounding” number of women among them. Although leery of indoor bathing, as we shall see, both Henri IV and Louis XIV were strong swimmers. Anne of Austria and her ladies-in-waiting spent hours each hot summer day in the Seine, modestly covered in loose gowns of coarse muslin that billowed out in the water. So many Parisians swam in the Seine that in 1688 an enterprising couple named Villain marked likely spots with ropes and posts, and rented out canvas-covered changing rooms, shifts and towels.

But cool water had never been considered as dangerous as hot water. To immerse yourself in hot water, you had to be foolhardy, German—or ill. Recommending that sick people plunge themselves into a substance considered unwise for healthy people sounds paradoxical, but it was a case of desperate remedies. Because water could infiltrate a healthy body and disturb the balance of its humours, doctors and patients