There is a city in Europe named after bathing, is this true or false? There is a king in France who has only bathed once in more than 60 years of reign, who is he?
One might say that Westerners do enjoy bathing more than we do.
For example, Herodotus recorded in the book "History" that the nobility of ancient Greece created a "steam bath".
A steam bath is a round hole in the roof of a small room, sunlight shines in, and then hot stones are taken into the house and watered up, generating a large amount of water vapor.
After steaming, they also apply a mixture of ointment and charcoal ash to the body, then scrub the body with fine sand, then shave the body with a curved scraper, and finally rinse it with water.
The ancient Greeks' admiration for bathing was not limited to the nobility.
According to the "History of Ancient Greek Weathering", if anyone comes to a guest, the ancient Greeks will first prepare a hot bath for the guest, making people feel welcome and energetic.
Of course, it is not only Greece that advocates bathing in the West, there is a country that loves bathing no less than the ancient Greeks, they even use the word "bath" to name a city, which country is this?
There is a little-known city in the UK called Bath, and people who are very flexible in English must know that the English word for "bath" is "bath", Bath got its name, so why do Bath people love bathing so much?
This is actually related to ancient Rome, in the ancient Roman period, Bath was included in the territory of ancient Rome, and the hot springs here are very famous, so the ancient Romans specially established a hot spring bath here.
Remains of thermal baths from the ancient Roman rule
The ancient Romans took full advantage of the local hot spring resources and built a hot bath in the baths.
In the hot bathroom there is a boiler room, the hot spring water is reheated, the underground of the boiler room is lined with a stack of tiles, so that the steam circulates back and forth between the tiles, making the room steaming, the ancient Romans will go to the hot spring after steaming, so why did the ancient Romans love bathing so much?
In addition to the extravagance of life, bathing was an important way for the Roman aristocracy at that time to socialize.
When it comes to bathing, the stain remover used to clean the body must be said, now most of the baths in people's homes use shower gel, and we used soap for a long time, so what was the soap before?
As we all know, soap before we used the most is soap, but what we don't necessarily know is that soap and soap are actually one word in English, and their production principle is the same.
The difference is that Westerners first invented soap, and later added some spices when making soap to produce soap, so how did Westerners invent soap?
The most widely circulated is that after knocking over a bottle of mutton fat, in order not to be blamed, he quickly took a pile of furnace ash and threw it on the oil. When he washed his hands, he found that the oil on his hands was not only quickly washed away, but also the dirt that had been difficult to clean before.
He washed his hands again with mutton fat mixed with furnace ash, and the effect was still the same, so he told others about it, and then someone began to make the first soap in this way.
But there was a time in history when people's concept of bathing changed drastically, not only afraid of bathing, but even thinking that bathing was a "flood beast".
Since the late Middle Ages, Europe has been hit by the Black Death (plague) many times, and its spread is very rapid, and the people who got the plague basically only die.
According to statistics, hundreds of millions of people died of the Black Death in Europe that year, so what does this have to do with bathing?
Europeans who died from the Black Death
People desperately tried to find the cause of the Black Death, and then it was noticed that many people fell ill after going to the public bath.
So more and more people think that it is precisely because bathing led to the Black Death, so many people began to refuse to bathe.
Later, some people said that the reason why people get sick is because this plague will bring a relatively dirty air, and when we take a hot bath, the pores of the body will open, and at this time the harmful substances in the air will enter the body, so don't take a bath.
At that time, not only commoners, but also many people with status, the most famous of which was King Louis XIV of France, who is said to have bathed only once in more than 60 years.
The reason why Louis XIV ranked first among the "famous people in history who did not bathe", in addition to the unpleasant body odor caused by not bathing for a long time, but more importantly, because his behavior of not bathing contributed to the development of the "perfume" industry.
As we all know, French perfume is world-famous, French people love perfume, there is a saying that because a large amount of perfume was needed to cover the body odor caused by not bathing, this situation did not change until the 19th century.
In the 50s of the 19th century, Pasteur proposed the "disease bacteria theory", which is not only a major advance in the history of world health, but also a fundamental change in people's concept of cleanliness.
People began to realize that the culprits of infectious diseases are those microorganisms that we cannot see with the naked eye, and bathing, washing faces, and other behaviors of maintaining personal hygiene and cleanliness not only do not bring diseases, but on the contrary, greatly reduce the risk of disease, and from that time on, Europeans once again paid attention to bathing.
With the advancement of the industrial revolution, not only soap with decontamination function began to enter the mass production stage, people's demand for cleaning products began to further upgrade, some people think that soap is used in turn unhygienic, and the last bit is wasted to throw away.
Based on this situation, in 1865 a man named William Shepard applied for a patent for "liquid soap", he dissolved ordinary solid soap in water, and then added ammonia to make the earliest liquid soap.
This is the prototype of the hand sanitizers, shower gels and other products we use today.
However, this liquid soap because of the addition of ammonia, the taste is quite bad, so few people bought it at that time, and later some people gradually improved it, adding spices when making it, making it fragrant, liquid soap has entered thousands of households and become a cleaning product used by people every day.
Later, someone added moisturizer to him, added various auxiliary materials, and people found it comfortable to bathe with it, so shower gel was born.
Of course, there is another major change in the history of human bathing. In ancient times, both in the East and the West, people's way of bathing was mainly a barrel bath, and although modern people said that the way of barrel bath was retained through the bathtub, ordinary people preferred to use the shower, so when did the earliest shower method appear?
You may not even think that this way of showering came about because of the war. It was 1857, when the 33rd Army of Marseille was about to embark on the expedition, but what about the smelly mud and sweat of the soldiers who had just finished training?
The army commander had a shower head connected to a water pipe, and each soldier was given a bar of soap to 3 people at a time, which was the initial shower.
And later people also found that the shower was more convenient and hygienic than the barrel bath, so the shower method was quickly promoted. After entering the 20th century, shower equipment has been continuously updated and developed, and gradually entered the homes of ordinary people.
These are some unknown stories in human history about bathing methods, bathing concepts, and the decontamination materials used in bathing.