History of Hygiene - Ancient Rome

[Pauligan]

Due to the expense of indoor toilets affordable only to aristocrats, commoners had to make do with the 150 public latrines sprinkled around Rome. These public latrines usually were also situated or connected to public baths, sensible since they shared the same water supply. These latrines contained numerous buckets called dolia curta. The dolia curta was the ideal urine pot, but also was easily transported when fullers (laundry cleaners who used urine in large vats) bought them. An amusing tidbit in Roman public latrines was that it acted as a popular loitering spot. People would sit there, talk to others, and ultimately hope to get invited to dinner!
Cleaning clothes during this time was never a truly essential chore. People were used to the smell, grime, and dirt. Though the cleaning that did occur would either be a quick rinse in a river, or hiring a fuller to soak and scrub there clothes in large vats of urine which acted as ammonia.
The emergence of soap is credited to the Celts of Gaul. Made from animal fat,or sheep tallow, soap proved to be more effective than olive oil and coarse salt.
Hair care during this time was strange, and painful. Men especially did not want hair on them. In public baths it was not unusual for other men to shave one another. Excess hair to them was "dirty" attracting lice, and hair removal was almost like a pastime. Akin to the nail filer of today, Rome's popular hair remover was a chilling tool called a strigil. The blunt tool's handle was usually made of ivory, and it was shaped like a flattened rectangle curving so one could grip it. Oil was rubbed on the part that was to be shaved, and instead of washing it off, oil had to be scraped off, resulting in sometimes painful shaves. Emperor Augustus of Rome was said to have a face ridden with sores due to excessive use of the strigil.



When men were men and not afraid of shaving one another. lol

[QuickHitGondolin]

I never gave it much thought of how people took care of their business thousands of years ago. lol

Hygiene in ancient Rome
By N.S. Gill
When trying to explain to children, students, readers, or friends...about daily life. Telling young children that there were no televisions, movies, or radio...doesn't convey the "primitive" conditions nearly so well as explaining that instead of using toilet paper, they used a communal sponge -- dutifully rinsed out after use...

[Urine tax] "Public urinals consisted of buckets, dolia curta. The contents were regularly collected and sold to the fullers for cleaning wool, etc. That's where the tax story comes in. The fullers were the ones who were taxed. The collectors had public contracts and could be fined if late...

"Florence Dupont (Daily Life in Ancient Rome) writes that it was for reasons of ritual that the Romans washed frequently. And she adds that ". . . even in very ancient times and even in the depth of the country, Romans, including women and slaves, would wash every day and would have a thorough bath on every feast day if not more often. At Rome itself, baths were taken daily...

"I have read that the Romans learned of soap from the Germans some time in the first century CE, and that previous to that they used urine (ammonia) for clothes. Using the two in combination, of course, would be even more effective. Urine was apparently treated in some way before use, but I do not know how. It may have been either a chemical process or a distillation...[ancienthistory.about.com]


Palaeoparasitology in Japan - Discovery of toilet features
By Akira MatsuiI; Masaaki KaneharaII; Masako KaneharaIII

The development of palaeoparasitology in Japan has occurred in recent decades. Despite the fact that archaeology in Japan has been slow to develop techniques for excavating ancient toilets, important information about the development of sanitation has been derived from the analysis of a few sites. This shows that the earliest people had very simple methods of sanitation. As populations increased, sanitation became more complex. Ditches surrounding early towns were used for excrement disposal. Eventually distinct toilets were developed followed by cesspit type toilets and flushing toilets. The parasites recovered from these toilets include many species that infect humans today. These parasite spectra reflect local use of aquatic, marine, and land animals. Fecal borne disease was an increasing problem as represented by whipworm and ascarid roundworm eggs. Interestingly, ascarid roundworms were absent in the earliest cultures and only became common with rice agriculture. Finds of pollen and seeds in toilet sediments reveal the use of medicinal plants to control the emerging problem of parasites...

A flushing toilet structure was found at Akita Castle (Figs 11, 12), the fortified offices of the central government of 8th to 9th century Japan located in the Tohoku area that includes Yanagi-no-gosho mentioned above. There, however, no fish tapeworm (Diphyllobothrium sp.) was found. Rather results indicated the presence of liver flukes and other parasites which tend to infect intermediate hosts such as cyprinids (i.e. carp). This may indicate that the toilet of Akita Castle was used not by people born and bred in Tohoku Area but rather by people posted or visiting from the central government of Nara or Kyoto, or by foreign delegates from Bo Hai Coast or others. Subsequent findings of toilet remains have been few, but the number of different types of parasite eggs identified are increasing little by little...

The Yayoi Period [400-250BC] to the Kofun (Burial Mound) Period [AD300-400] and Later: Use of Moats as Toilets

The settlements of the Yayoi Period came to have a much greater population than ever before. As a result, many people had to live together within the confines of a limited amount of space all the year round. With regard to settlements in low lying land at the very least, it has been established that they were encircled by a moat and divided into several areas including a residential area, storage buildings, sacred area, and burial area. The existence of toilets, however, has not been firmly established. Nonetheless, the scientific analysis of the sediment obtained from moats encircling the Yayoi settlements has revealed the interesting facts that follow...

This led...to conjecture that these moats once had a structure to allow excrement to be washed away when the water level rose due to rainfall etc...People dug wells in their settlements to obtain potable water, and discharged domestic wastewater and excrement into a channel or moat encircling the settlement. The old appellation for toilet in the Japanese language is "Kawa-ya", the sound of which may phonically remind us of two Chinese characters: i.e., "river-house". Supposedly, this is a derivation of the word for toilet...

In the mountainous areas, the river-house type toilet was built as being suspended over a natural stream even to latter days. In famous Koya-san in Wakayama Prefecture, a mountain temple and the cathedral town, clean water obtained from fountains and wells was used for cooking, dish washing, bathing, and washing, and then gathered and directed to a toilet built hanging on a cliff in order to let excrement fall with the water into the Ozo River that runs under the cliff. A toilet similar to this type was excavated at the Komyosen-ji (temple), a mountain temple of the Kamakura Period (1192-1333) in Yamashiro Town, Kyoto Prefecture. The toilet features excavated there were designed so that water collected at the lowest spot in the precincts. Here people relieved themselves by straddling a ditch framed by stones. Wastewater passed through a closed conduit which was provided through the foundation of a wall to flow out into a flume running beneath the temple. In case of river-house type toilet, there are no parasite eggs and undigested remains in the soil...

It has been said that the premodern Japanese ceased to eat very much land mammal meat since the introduction of the Buddism at the middle of 6th AD, although the archaeology has revealed that this is false story of the superficial taboo for meat consumption...Owing to the fact that there were few domestic animals in Japan, there was less detection of parasites such as a fluke (Fasciola hepatica) that parasitize sheep and beef. This can be viewed as a particular feature of Japanese palaeoparasitology. Thus, despite the lack of findings of actual remains of mammalians and fishes in archaeological sites, through the development of palaeoparasitology an entirely new field has been opened, making possible deeper and more revealing research regarding the food customs of ancient people.

There are interesting drawings in the link to this report:

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0074-02762003000900019&script=sci_arttext

Edward I castles


And what about the bathroom? You may know that medieval toilets left much to be desired--for quite a few reasons. In some castles, the urinal might simply be a hole in the floor. Castle toilets were built out of stone (sometimes with a stone seat, sometimes with wood) and projected out over the castle walls, so that the waste would drop below-- outside the castle walls. Often some poor soul was required to clean out the cesspool. The odor around most castle toilets would have been quite a stench. The photo above shows a series of toilets (or garderobes) built into the town wall of Conwy, Wales...

http://www.jamesmdeem.com/castlepage.edwardI.htm

There are many revealing photos of the inner workings of the castles here.
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[H20gerl]

I thought the Greeks used olive and other oils not only for their perfume quality but also to deep biting flies and other bugs away.