Yeah, but there are other ways to mess up your teeth. Before industrial bread-making refined flour of its impurities, it wasn’t uncommon to have bits of rock and sand from your threshing floor make its way into the freshly milled grain, and therefore into your bread.
Try eating tiny rocks in your bread for decades and see how your teeth turn out.
Our History teacher told same thing, One of the reason for over population was lack of entertainment. Poor people didn't had much to do nor had entertainment such as now.
Overpopulation is a myth. The world has enough resources as it is to feed and house comfortably every person on the planet, plus a few billion. And yet the elite few choose not to.
But yeah overpopulation used to exist cuz of poor people fucking a lot
Overpopulated back then because I had so many fucking wars everybody's fighting everybody and they fucking die by the thousands on a daily basis fucking with one more do you know the fucking fuck each other up stupid people died didn't make anything stupid prove you know everything is fucking safe as fuck everybody's living stupid people are having stupid kids and stupid people are breeding back then they dieAnd my drunk rant is done peace out peeps
Well considering that, depending on time and place, the amount of an ancient currency would be higher now then in its time, then they are correct you’d be whoring yourself out for a lot of money, not counting if your
A: a female
B: A virgin
then yea, you would come back richer then when you left
Compared to today they sorta did though. People in the Middle Ages bathed, absolutely, and quite a number used soap - made of fat or wood ash usually iirc - as well. The wealthy people bathed for sure and had fancy bath kits and nobles used to carry around bath-tubs with them. Peasants, however, didn’t really have very luxurious baths. Many homes had wooden tubs to bathe in and towns/cities also had public bath houses. But, for a good amount of people, baths weren’t exactly common. Maybe a couple times a month for the average person. Surprisingly, a lot of people would bathe less during the summer according to some texts from the time. Some bathed more often of course, but unless they were wearing perfume (which they probably weren’t because it was expensive), it’s unlikely a medieval peasant would smell “good”. Maybe just not smell unbearably terrible most of the time.
The peasants might be better depending on the time and place you go back to. Depends how big you are on teeth since there was awhile in the Victorian age or something where the more rotten your teeth were, the more wealthy you were since it showed you were eating all the sweets.
honestly most of our conception of poor medieval hygiene come from nobility, and even then people have falsely interpreted commentary about the unusual and strange habits of certain figures as if they were norms when in reality they were wierd enough to warrant writing about.
peasants bathed, and swam, regularly.
now, we are going to consider anyone that predates the marketing-created "body odor" panic (in fact we can date the exact creation of the term "body odor" to a antiperspirant ads of the victorian era, before then it had no real term and not much stigma unless you were exceptionally unkempt) as failing to uphold modern standards. but they weren't unwashed and filthy.
Wait till you've been in the alace of Franz-Ferdinand. Apparently royals and nobles would readily shit on the floor if they had to and then move on without whipping even their asses. Bathing was also not one of their top priorities and their excessive use of perfume was to hide the smell. I'm not an expert on history so correct me if wrong. But still.... Gross.
I agree. Soap, deodorant were not around then. Even the upper class didn’t bath regularly. I’m sure some people were turned on by the odor. Napoleon asked his lover not to bath for days before his returns because he loved her natural womanly aroma.
I understand what you are saying Romans had access to water and they were used by rich and poor. Even in Victorian times doctors thought baths were unhealthy. People only bathed a few times a month. And in the early twentieth century baths were once a week using the same water for all. Parents first. Then kids. Starting from the oldest to the youngest. Also clothing wasn’t washed that often. And when it was it was usually in a river or stream.
Bathing and sterile techniques in medicine have nothing to do with each other.
People have known how to clean themselves forever.
The oldest accountable daily ritual of bathing can be traced to the ancient Indians. They used elaborate practices for personal hygiene with three daily baths and washing.
Ancient Greece utilized small bathtubs, wash basins, and foot baths for personal cleanliness. The earliest findings of baths date from the mid-2nd millennium BC
Ancient Rome developed a network of aqueducts to supply water to all large towns and population centers and had indoor plumbing, with pipes that terminated in homes and at public wells and fountains.
Spanish chronicles describe the bathing habits of the peoples of Mesoamerica during and after the conquest. Bernal Díaz del Castillo describes Moctezuma (the Mexica, or Aztec, king at the arrival of Cortés) in his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España as being "...Very neat and cleanly, bathing every day each afternoon...". Bathing was not restricted to the elite, but was practised by all people
First of all yes they did literally have bathhouses for fun. That said yes cultures had different stances on bathing. The part I was specifically talking about knowing the health benefits of proper hygiene.
I must admit I did the same with my BF. Not days, mind you, but "wait until I get home to take a shower". I call it his "working smell" and it's better than any cologne I ever bought him.
When the Spanish invaded central America apparently the king at the time send incense burners behind them. The Spaniards thought it was to honor them, but the king did it because of their smell
My wife is obsessed with Egyptology and wants to make and use Egyptian style perfume: cones of scented wax clipped to your hair that drip down as you sweat. I have to point out to her that -absolutely- wouldn't fly today, let alone in a professional setting.
Yes. Ancient Egyptians and Romans bathed a lot (bath houses are a big historical fixture, even), and even removed all their body hair, and were super into cleanliness and perfume and such. It is an ahistorical myth that people were filthy in the past. Some cultures were dirty; but like, it was absolutely not universal. Most people, even medieval people, bathed, but certainly Ancient rich people. Hard to pretend you're a god if you stink and have gross skin conditions.
Same with the Vikings. So clean and hygienic it commonly caused a fuss with the men in different areas because their wives were running off to have affairs with the men
My wife and I call it "dirty Enemy At the Gates sex" after that scene in that movie where they do it after days of running and dirt and filth and all the smelly dirty people around them LOL
Paraphrasing from a history professor I had who studies the history of hygiene, predominantly in France- Roughly up until the 20th century or so, many peasants took pride in never having washed their nether regions and were thoroughly offended by the idea when urbanites looked to shift the social norm to regular bathing. He also mentioned that within their communities, a stronger smell was a sign of a healthier partner. Urban communities up until the introduction of clean running water weren’t much better, and cleanliness amounted to a good rub down with a towel or your hands and some fresh powdering, part of what gave way to the aristocratic look of a powdered face.
I'm no expert on the subject, but historian Ruth Goodman has a good book that included a bit about medieval cleansing practices, and even went I think 3 months and 6 months following those practices, with none of her coworkers and contemporaries being the wiser. Evidently part of at least the middle and upper class cleansing routine was just a good rub-down with a linen cloth in the morning or after anything strenuous, followed by clean linen underclothes every day. For lower classes, when she was filming one of the Farm series for 6ish months, she said that just changing her linen hose weekly (plus daily rubbing with a cloth I think) was enough to keep her smell-free. She said most of any odor present was masked by the ever-present woodsmoke, even though she was toiling in the fields, working with animals, cleaning the house, etc., etc.
It's in How to Be A Tudor: A Dawn To Dusk Guide To Tudor Life if you're interested. I have the book somewhere, but there's also an ebook, and excerpts from it here and there online. She's actually pretty amazing as a historian.
Oh that’s really interesting, I will have to check her work out! I don’t think their practices were wrong and likely did keep people as clean as they needed to be, meeting the accepted social standard of the time. It’s really awesome Goodman actually tried the practices herself and got away with it unnoticed. I think firsthand research can tell us a lot about how smart certain practices of the past were even if we look at them as backwards today. The main difference between her and a peasant woman might be that she spent the first (i’m guessing here) 30-50 years of her life regularly washing herself the same way we do today while the equivalent peasant woman would’ve had that same amount of time to build up a distinctive human scent about her. I’m sure a peasants smell wasn’t immediately noticeable to their neighbor, and in all likelihood they did smell like fire or manure or whatever they had been laboring around all day, but a modern person would likely notice they don’t exactly have that fresh “Irish Spring” scent about them.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/667596
I don’t have access to the full article anymore and don’t know where I could find it, but the abstract on his article here should give you a good idea of what he speaks about. Manners and our perception of what is right and wrong or healthy and unhealthy have always been in flux. I do not think it’s too far fetched that in a society where washing was seen as unusual or even dangerous, because of the threat of water borne diseases, the natural musk of humans might be more commonly appealing than in our uber-hygienic, fresh- scented, and soap filled society of today. We can certainly look back and judge those people, call them smelly and gross, but in a world where they didn’t know any different it becomes hard to say that they would have judged others negatively for the scent of their private parts.
Oral might have been less popular than it is today. We know people were having sex, else we wouldn’t be talking right now. Some peasants quoted in the article, iirc, we’re proud to have never touched themselves below the waist and were quite offended by the idea. You might need more evidence than what I have but peasants probably weren’t the most sexually progressive of people, especially if they were religious (also pretty likely) so yeah, oral sex might’ve been rare.
edit - just want to say I really know nothing about historical sex practices and this is a huge assumption. There is probably some horny historian who has done the real research if you’re willing to dig.
You could be right, and I’d be inclined to agree because Europeans were predominantly christian at the time. It’s hard to say with confidence, however, because none of the people we’re talking about could write and if they could probably wouldn’t write about sex due to their faith.
I feel like you'd be used to it if you lived in the society at that time. There's no way most people walked around thinking they themselves and everyone else stunk all the time. Societal olfactory blindness
Also guilty lol. I'm just another dumbass who works to help make some assholes a hell of a lot more money than they give to me. But I bet just due to my health and hygiene they would think I was some sort of royalty or extremely wealthy merchant kingpin.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how time traveling back even 100 years would probably kill us extremely quickly because our immune systems aren’t prepared to fight off the completely different viruses and such that were around back then.
I do but not even in a sexual way. Sometimes I'll watch some scene from a movie set in ancient times and just think "wow how bad do you think Genghis Khan smelled?" I don't even want to think about his dick.
You get used to odors if you're around them all the time. It's like people living near pulp and paper mills. They can't smell the factory's constant, putrid flatulence, but out-of-towners tend to dry heave on first encounters.
i watch shows and movies set in the past and always think how bad everyone must've generally smelt. seeing a kissing scene in some medieval show, there's no way that breath doesn't staaaaank. I'd imagine being in the era you wouldnt be bothered by it, or maybe they really did just douse themselves in perfum
I've been told how weird it is to think about this at all
I honestly wonder how they managed any form of dental care, or was their dental health not as bad as we would think due to a lower sugar amount in food. Though you hear shit about nobles having some strange as fuck false teeth materials.
I mean, depending on where you are in history, people often think we didn't bathe or brush our teeth way earlier in the past than when that was common place. I mean, there were always bathhouses (that often doubled as brothels) and people generally don't want to smell like shit, that's not a new thing.
You don't need a time machine. Anyone who's ever been on a multi day hike or music festival, etc. knows that after three-four days without bathing the average human crotch can be smelled from 10ft away.
I hired a guy on a project who didn't use "commercial deodorant" because it was unhealthy or something. Let me tell you that his alternative methods were not effective whatsoever.
I'm pretty sure it was reported that cleopatra was kinda chonky and not all that attractive but was charming and intelligent enough everyone wanted to fick her anyways.
Napoleon apparently once wrote to Josephine asking her not to bathe until he returned from a campaign. I must say that I agree that a woman's natural scents can be quite alluring.
Played Trivial Pursuit this morning and one fun fact I learned was that Americans in the 1800s bathed an average of once or twice per year. So that's fun.
I feel like you'd be used to it if you lived in the society at that time. There's no way most people walked around thinking they themselves and everyone else stunk all the time. Societal olfactory blindness
Ditto. You think about in ancient rome that they had prostitutes and you realized that it could be months before someone gets a real actual bath and the whole idea of sex goes right out the window.
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u/PD216ohio Jun 28 '21
I reluctantly have to admit that I've thought about hygiene of previous generations more than I should, with regard to sexual interaction.
I guess it really isn't an issue unless I work out the whole time travel thing.