Neat! Say, when did surgeons start washing their hands? Look it up ;)
Perhaps, but definitely there was poor public sanitation simply because of lack of knowledge. Cholera was epidemic because people would throw their crap outside their homes or just about anywhere they like. Cholera is not common anymore thanks to 19th century science that studied why the disease persisted.
Explanation: While medieval hygiene was far from great by modern standards, especially amongst the non-elite, it was about normal for pre-modern societies. People took baths - if not always in tubs, then at least in the local rivers and streams. The 'medieval people didn't bathe' myth is actually more accurate to the Renaissance period, when a mixture of urban culture in bath-houses making them suspected as places of 'sin', and a strange variation of miasma ('bad smell') theory caused ~150-200 years of anti-bathing sentiment. Bathing never entirely went away, but became less popular.
Miasma theory was normally used to encourage cleanliness, but in the Renaissance, a prominent variation of the theory was used to discourage bathing - as bathing would open up the pores of the skin, and let the 'bad air' in to the body. As long as the 'miasma' was on the outside, it was safe!
The "ill repute" of bath houses wasn't entirely undeserved. One factor that made people shun them in the early modern period was also the spread of syphilis which you could easily get from visiting a bath house of ill repute. Also, wood was getting more scarce due to wide spread deforestation. And that bath houses needed a lot of wood.
Don't let the bad air in through tiny fucking skin holes!
Multiple much larger holes on face sucking in "miasma" every few seconds to live:
I'm going to divorce my wife so that I can start dating again, just to ask their opinions on miasma during first dates.
We're supposed to take bathing info from a pug? Don't you guys go for the "licking things clean" method of washing?
My favorite example is when I talk about medieval hygiene and someone replies: "but yes, they were dirty in the Middle Ages, look at the French king Louis XIV for example, he never took a bath willingly for his all life". And then I look at them with a look that is both dejected and tired and I wait to see if they understands on their own.
I feel like the cross section of "people who knew King Louis XIV refused to take baths" and "people who don't know even approximately when Louis XIV ruled" would be relatively small. Is that not the case?
Apparently not, at least not in France.
But it's something I saw with a lot of subject: as soon as something bad occurred before the 19th century, it's in the Middle Ages in the mind of most people.
Me, seeing this saying "medieval people" and realizing it means "a slice of the world's population that lived in this (probably western European), but I guess fuck the rest and they don't count"
'Medieval' to refer to societies outside of Europe remains a very contested usage.
Lemmy gets it; on BlueSky there were far too many people being all "but they were dirty tho" when they're really just mixing it up with Late Renaissance / Early Industrial. London was practically unlivable!
At least into the early modern period they restored the understanding that cleanliness was good, just had a harder time achieving it XD
Correct me if im wrong, but what you have to think about is the pest. It was so deadly, because the hygiene (in terms of the streets) was terrible causing massive rat populations and therefore spreading the disease.
That's more about trash disposal than personal hygiene, though.
