The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [46]
BATHING, RUSSIAN STYLE
Catherine the Great (1729–1796) forbade mixed bathing, so no men were allowed in the women’s bath, “except the necessary attendants, or painters or physicians, who came there to prosecute their studies. Accordingly, an amateur assumes one or other of these titles to obtain admission.”
In addition to exciting the stupid mind, there was something patriotic and bracingly northern about bathing in frigid water. “A cold regimen suits cold countries,” Floyer writes, connecting the practice with the longevity and energy of northern cultures. The Briton who shunned southern imports, such as wine, coffee, tea, spices and tobacco, and plunged into cold water was living as nature intended.
LUST AND THE COLD BATH
In the second part of Cold Bathing, Floyer’s colleague Dr. Edward Baynard noted that when two boys ran a race, if the loser was dipped in cold water and the race rerun, the loser would invariably win. Although cold baths were a traditional remedy for lust, honesty compelled Baynard to admit that they frequently had the opposite effect. One such bather whose passions had been reignited was inspired to versify:
Cold Bathing has this Good alone,
It makes Old John to hug Old Joan.
And gives a sort of Resurrection
To buried Joys, through lost Erection.
And do’s fresh Kindness’s entail
On a Wife Tastless, Old, and Stale.
The History of Cold Bathing was addressed to an audience that could cope with learned allusions and the odd Latin quotation. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, pitched his Primitive Physick: or, an Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases at the folk level. His manual went through twenty-one editions in four decades after its publication in 1747 and was always on sale in Methodist chapels. For Wesley, as for other pre-Romantic champions of the simple and natural, “primitive” was good, and his home remedies ranged from a paste of honey and onions to cure baldness to tiny pieces of wine-soaked bread inserted in the nostrils to moderate a greedy appetite. Cold bathing was a key prescription, and he filled a page in listing the conditions, including blindness and leprosy, it had been known to cure.
“Mrs. Watts, by using the Cold Bath two and twenty Times in a Month, was entirely cured of an Hysterick Cholic, Fits, and convulsive Motions, continual Sweatings and Vomiting, wandering Pains in her Limbs and Head, with total loss of appetite.”
—John Wesley, Primitive Physick
In a sermon he delivered in 1791, Wesley adapted a Hebrew proverb into an English phrase that became a standard of mothers and schoolteachers: “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” Although now used mostly as a prod for children who need to shower or clean their fingernails, the cleanliness Wesley referred to was that of dress. Similarly, Primitive Physick rarely concerns itself with personal hygiene. Houses, clothes and furniture should be “as clean and sweet as possible,” but for bodies, he recommended only frequent shaving and foot washing. Babies should be dipped in cold water every morning until the age of eight or nine months, to prevent “Rickets, Tenderness and Weakness,” but after that only their hands and feet needed to be immersed.
The cold baths Wesley recommended were in plain water, as were most of Floyer’s. But Floyer also endorsed sea bathing, particularly for paralytics. That was bizarre advice in the early eighteenth century, when people regarded the sea with dread and entered it only as a last, futile measure after being bitten by a mad dog. People waded and swam in rivers and lakes but not in the sea. For hundreds of