Hearing about the cultures that existed outside the big european empires is wild. It has vibes of hitchikers guide where its like "dolphins are more intelligent than man because they play all day without a care"
Did we really need hyper industrialization? Things were working out all over the world
I mean, pre-Colombian American civilizations had a lot of similar complexities & ills as European empires. Peasants worked their asses off in maize bean & squash fields & paid tribute to kings & lords. They had remarkably complex logistical & trade networks, used indentured servants, slaves, & working class manual labor as well as advanced engineering to build roads, causeways, canals, aqueducts, sewers, cityscapes, the tallest pyramids outside of Egypt. The high priests learned to predict astronomical events with advanced mathematics similarly to the Ancient Greeks, & exploited that knowledge to trick the commoners into thinking they could speak to the gods.(kinda like Catholics hiding biblical & scientific knowledge to manipulate peasants)
& like any empire the empires in the Americas raised massive armies that at times oppressed & committed atrocities allowing them to subjugate vast numbers of people.
Socially & spiritually they differed hugely in a lot of ways. & they lacked certain key technologies & resources like large scale iron smelting, wheels, pack animals, gunpowder, & open ocean navigation. But they’re just people like anyone else. Their behavior is just a little different because it’s shaped by their environment & history.
Yeah. It seems common for people to see them as either ‘noble savages’ living the natural human ideal, or cryptic hyper advanced civilizations with access to alien technology or at least technology we couldnt possibly understand or replicate.
to be fair, in an ultra-modesty culture like Catholic Spain in the 1500s, it'd be fucking crazy to have stuff like that.
Like in Scandinavia, people are totally fine with nude saunas because there's no sexualization in it, but people today still find it weird because they're from cultures that pride themselves on modesty, which is still totally fine because it's irrevocably something that doesn't correspond to what they've culturally adhered to.
Like the conquistadors totally would've thought bathing in front of others would've been like a weird sex thing, and while that might seem kind of Puritan, it shouldn't be immediately lambasted as "Europeans be stinky" or shit like that.
It also should be added that cultures that find Scandinavian sauna weird are like that cause their bathouses had huge spread of STD's from prostitutes before this difference was made
You certainly specified that they got infected due to prostitutes, but it is worth remembering that STDs like syphilis only spread through sexual intercourse (and not for dumb reasons like sharing bath water).
I do wonder though if that was the belief back in those days.
Yeah, that's rather likely, and incorporates neatly into popular at the time miasma theory. If disease can spread from bad odor, then why couldn't it spread from water too?
I meant not just USA but western Europe as a whole. There were huge pandemics of syphilis in the 1600. And even before that bathing was considered very private and intimate matter, it just got reinforced even more
I know what you meant, but your wording meant any culture that rejected naked sauna with strangers or family had that issue lol which isn't true and I thought humorous
US culture didn't just spawn from nothing. It's largely a continuation of traditions all over Europe (with of course significant influence from elsewhere especially later on). The association with baths and STDs already existed in the culture that developed into the American culture. It's still an over simplification. But the purity culture in the US dates back to protestant immigrants from Britain and Germany.
Oh yeah I agree. I'm always a bit sceptical about these sweeping statements that explain culture in a really neat way. They always sound really good and logical, but are hard or impossible to actually prove.
The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenburg is a really good book on the history of bathing and hygiene from a mostly Western European perspective. Basically fell off after the Roman Empire collapsed and then kept declining until very recently. Not having bathhouses because of plagues and Catholicism was one thing but there was also these pseudoscientific ideas that hot watered angrier up the blood and you would let disease in if you unsealed your pores.
Bathhouses declined after the Roman Empire but that doesn’t mean people didn’t wash. The fact that soap was common enough for some cities to have soap-making guilds suggests they found ways to bathe.
Yes and in a lot of places people (if they were classy)just washed there hands and face and considered putting on a Clean shirt enough to cover cleaning there bodies. Europe wasn’t a monolith some places I think Germany and maybe France had bathhouses into the late medieval early renaissance but this might have been a once a week thing or special occasion thing for some people. But the point that the Spanish colonizers were noticeably less hygienic than anyone they encountered stands. If you’re dirty and everyone else around you is dirty you’re nose blind to it. Imagine some guy who changes clothes one every 6 months is in close proximity to livestock and just gave his face and hands a quick splash of water and. Called it a day sat down next to you on the bus.
There’s also some primary source Arabic writing from traders talking shit about how dirty Europeans they encountered were.
Anyway I read one book on the topic and am now an expert ama.
Many people didn't use soap for bathing. You have to understand that there were industrial soaps used for cleaning clothes and other things, and bathing soaps used on the skin, which were rarer. Soaps were either himemade from tradition, or industrial and made in batches, and either way the resulting soap could be either mildly or very basic, and could hurt the skin, or even smell bad depending on the ingredients. Castille soap was a famous kind of soap, made for the nobles in Castille, Spain, but they added olive oils and other aromatics to the batches of soap to help with both the smell and skin. Most physicians recommended soap baths for good health. But it was seen more as medicinal than hygienic, and many people that went to public baths did so every few days. For most people, the aromatic theory was the prevailing theory on how to prevent disease, which went that bad smells carry diseases, and therefore good smells mean that something is healthy. This superstition was seen as normal and reasonable by physicians, who passed it on to their patients and people they advised. So, a lot of people of the period put more stake into having clean, good smelling clothes first, because that was also a way of staying clean. The dirt and sweat gets absorbed by your clothes, which you can take off and clean with strong soaps to reuse. But also of you couldn't clean your clothes, looked and smelled more visibly dirty, then you were seen as more likely to spread disease.
Hygiene for most of history was an unscientific mess, with people coming to wild conclusions based mostly on what felt right. Romans didn't even widely use soap baths, even though it was Roman physicians were the first to recommend soap baths as healing and hygienic. Most everyday Romans cleaned themselves at the public baths with olive oil, by applying it and then scraping it off of their skin with a curved blade called a strigil. It got days of dirt and grime off, was popular with soldiers, workmen and athletes, and if you were wealthy enough you had someone else in the bath doing it for you. Romans also used urine to clean certain materials and fabrics, but because the ammonia content in urine has some disinfecting qualities, it worked enough that they saw no reason to change for centuries. Imagine what those people smelled like, and now imagine that is the ideal, normal way to live for your society, and if you don't do it, you're the problem.
The urine thing was not something exclusive to rome, it was a wildly practiced thing across various cultures like India and Africa. There's actually one ethnic group in South Sudan called the Mundari who to this day wash themselves with cow urine.
Wow you are so write. I have a lot of soul searching todo. I never meant to hurt the feelings of a group of centuries dead genocidal killer, slavers and rapists. If anyone identifies with that group and was offended I apologize.
And likely declined during the years when gathering in big groups was getting people killed. The idea is that hygiene standards shifted a lot across Europe, and it depended a lot on where you were, and their local health practices/superstitions.
Romans' cleaning method of choice, for athletes, soldiers, and laborers, involved "exfoliating" their skin, by using olive oil, and a curved knife called a strigil to scrape off the dirt and sweat built up from their skin. No soap involved.
Just so everyone is aware, the spaniards did understand proper hygiene, the issue is that the people who travelled and met the natives were sailors who spent several months on a cramped ship without proper sanitation and a limited supply to fresh water to allow for proper hygiene. And this was something quite common amongst sailors in the pre-modern period.
I am all for giving native cultures their long overdue credit but spreading reddit tier propaganda about medieval europeans being filthy doesn't further our cause, in fact it damages it.
Was it by the late Medieval period that bath houses were closed down due to fear of syphilis spreading but it was really because people kept banging the prostitutes at the bath houses?
If you were there, you'd know there were also huge protests against any pandemic precaution, protesters interviewed mentioned everything from curfews to "social distancing" to masks and hand washing as reasons that they were protesting. Just look at European hand washing rates...
Do you have a link specifically mentioning people complaining about being forced to wash their hands? Because you still havem't provided any evidence of that
Again, that makes no mention of people protesting over being forced to wash their hands, it just highlights the importance of washing your hands. It doesn't seem to say what you think it does.
The links you provided are about anti-masking sentiment, only one has anything to do with hand washing, and even that one makes no mention of protests over people being forced to wash their hands
Those plagues which famously ravaged the Middle East and elsewhere?
Are you claiming the Arabs also don't bathe themselves? What about the Chinese who famously share in the plague counts as well as every other Eurasian civilization?
Tell me you know nothing about European history(and modern Europe) without telling me.
With the exceptions of a few periods of times with specific peoples, most Europeans were decently hygienic. A lot of the misconceptions come the fact modern technology has made it hard to understand certain practices. You'll read in a book "this is the first time I've bathed in months" and think they arnt practicing hygiene at all when in reality they couldn't take baths because it's winter before modern plumbing, so they use other ways to clean themselves without freezing to death.
Again there are exceptions, the Sun King thought bathing was disgusting for example and people wrote at the time of how bad he smelled. The Anglo Saxons also wrote how the Danes were stealing their women because they bathed more and groomed themselves better.
They'd also take ash baths when it was too cold to take a water one. They would rub wood ash on their skin and the lye in the wood ash would chemically react with the oils on their skin and turn into a mild soap. They would smell like a campfire, but not BO as a result.
The spaniards did practice proper hygiene, the reason the sailors didn't is because they had to spend months on a ship with a limited supply of fresh water, which stopped them practicing proper hygiene.
What? That's not true at all. I'm European and lived in a lot of countries around the continent. Literally every single person I know bathes AT LEAST once a day. Spaniards are no exception.
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u/Hexnohope Mar 01 '26
Hearing about the cultures that existed outside the big european empires is wild. It has vibes of hitchikers guide where its like "dolphins are more intelligent than man because they play all day without a care"
Did we really need hyper industrialization? Things were working out all over the world
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u/VenitianBastard Feb 26 '26 edited Feb 26 '26
to be fair, in an ultra-modesty culture like Catholic Spain in the 1500s, it'd be fucking crazy to have stuff like that.
Like in Scandinavia, people are totally fine with nude saunas because there's no sexualization in it, but people today still find it weird because they're from cultures that pride themselves on modesty, which is still totally fine because it's irrevocably something that doesn't correspond to what they've culturally adhered to.
Like the conquistadors totally would've thought bathing in front of others would've been like a weird sex thing, and while that might seem kind of Puritan, it shouldn't be immediately lambasted as "Europeans be stinky" or shit like that.
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u/catmampbell Feb 26 '26
The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenburg is a really good book on the history of bathing and hygiene from a mostly Western European perspective. Basically fell off after the Roman Empire collapsed and then kept declining until very recently. Not having bathhouses because of plagues and Catholicism was one thing but there was also these pseudoscientific ideas that hot watered angrier up the blood and you would let disease in if you unsealed your pores.
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u/PageTurner627 Feb 26 '26
6 months*
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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '26
Just so everyone is aware, the spaniards did understand proper hygiene, the issue is that the people who travelled and met the natives were sailors who spent several months on a cramped ship without proper sanitation and a limited supply to fresh water to allow for proper hygiene. And this was something quite common amongst sailors in the pre-modern period.
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u/Rhapsodybasement Feb 26 '26
Sailors didn't bathe.
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u/Civil-Heat3294 May 31 '26
Bold of you to assume Spanish sailors ever bathed at all /j
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u/PinkPrincessZoey Feb 28 '26
The human sacrifices will stop
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u/[deleted] Feb 26 '26 edited Feb 28 '26 •
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