They only took showers once a week?
Did I understand correctly?
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Baths were taken less frequently in past times than they are now, because before indoor plumbing, filling a bath by hand was hard work, and if you wanted hot water it would have to be heated up over the fire before you filled your tub, and it would need emptying afterwards. For most people, a bath was a weekly thing. But people washed themselves down with a sponge or a wash cloth, bedrooms in Victorian times for instance had washstands, with a jug and a basin, and you would fill the bowl with water and then strip off and sponge yourself down. Well off people would wash more comfortably, as they had servants to bring up hot water to their rooms. In her autobiography, Agatha Christie wrote that servants brought hot water to bedrooms four times a day in her childhood (that was in the 1890s). The well off would also be able to bathe more frequently, as they would have servants to do the hard work of filling and emptying the bathtub.
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birder-3 says > The well off would also be able to bathe more frequently, as they would have servants to do the hard work of filling and emptying the bathtub.True but cleanliness also wasn't that important to them at the time. People had only recently learned about germs and their relationship to disease and illness. Logistically it was more difficult to keep clean but it wasn't a problem most people were trying to solve.
Woman, man! That's the way it should be Tarzan. [Tarzan and his mate] share
They also weren't doing physical labor or any vigorous exercise. Well most of the people in this film. The did go in swimming though, I can't imagine not showering after that. I remember in Hunchback of Notre Dame the king was complaining about not wanting to bathe because he had already done so that year. At least one good thing came from the lack of bathing, perfume.
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