教甄◆英文科題庫

       As a central part of life, bathing practices throughout history have reflected changing ideals around personal care and health. In ancient times, particularly within the Roman Empire, bathing was almost entirely a public affair. Only the wealthiest few had their own private baths, while everyone else participated in the ritual of communal bathing, which often took place in sprawling bath complexes and included massages, libraries, and even food and drink.

       “There’s lots of artistic illustrations showing parties and things going on in the baths and people having dinner in the bath,” says Virginia Smith, a historian and author of Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity.

       For the ancient Greeks, bathing was often a ritualistic self-purification before religious rites or welcoming guests, according to Katherine Ashenburg, author of The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History. Traditional Japanese-style bathhouses were used for both therapeutic and religious purposes, and later as social gathering places. Russian banyas and Turkish hammams were also historically important hubs of social and religious activity. 

       “Bathing was not always connected in people’s minds with cleanliness,” Ashenburg says. “Sometimes getting in water was thought to be, not just doing nothing for you in terms of becoming clean, but was actually dangerous to your health.”

       During the Black Death, for instance, public baths closed because Medieval Europeans believed that opening the pores with hot water would allow the plague to enter through the skin. Though this thinking was incorrect, there were hygiene concerns in public baths, according to James Hamblin, a physician and lecturer at Yale University and author of Clean: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less. “Some accounts of ancient bath houses…described layers of slime across the surface of the water,” he says. “If anything, you were exposing yourself to pathogens.”