On Sunday 15 Mar 2009 8:18:27 am Charles Haynes wrote: > There was a time when European Christians considered it vain to bathe > too often. Japanese woodcuts during the era of first contact sometimes > depict westerners with flies flying around them because the Japanese > considered them to have such a bad smell.
This is interesting information. Could the "vanity" part have been because only the richest could afford to bathe often in those times and the Church was catering to the (unwashed) faithful? As a twenty something man my father was travelling to Europe (in 1945) en route to the US for a PhD. It turned out that he was put on, of all ships, the Queen Elizabeth, which doubled up as a troop carrier for US GIs returning after the war that had just ended. The first morning a woman (a chambermaid?) asked my father if he would like to bathe - and being Indian and Brahmin he said yes instantly, after which the woman readied a huge tub of hot water for him. The next morning the woman failed to turn up and when my father caught up with her and asked her to ready a bath she asked "What? Again?". I'm not sure how much my father got to bathe on the journey after that. In the mid-1980s I saw a news item in British newspaper in the UK claiming that British teenagers on average had more baths per week than French teenagers. The news would be laughable to the average Indian Brahmin because a bath (or at least personal washing in flowing water) is considered essential every day. But if you lived in the UK a couple of centuries or more ago - you would have to be wealthy enough to obtain fuel for heating water to bathe, and this factor is often not understood by obsevers who speak of "dirty" foreigners. On the positive side - you don;t perspire much in those temperate climes. Bathing in water at the ambient temperature in the UK is just not on. As for me personally - the only time I manged to consider it OK to jump into the sea in the UK was one early September aftrenoon when the air temperature was warm. but the North Sea was freezing cold to me - a far cry from the warm currents off Pondicherry where I spent ecstatic hours in the sea. How the Japanese got past this - I don't know maybe they have enough hot springs. I wonder who invented the shower - which I believe is one of the greatest hygiene related inventions ever. shiv
