Why Stale Urine Went Into the Wash and Bathing Was Feared

For centuries, people washed their clothes in stale urine, and some bathed in milk, because they believed these habits were good for the body. In the past, washing was not simply about getting clean. It was wrapped up with elaborate attempts to understand how the body worked, how it stayed healthy and how it became ill.

Stale urine did the job of soap

Before commercially manufactured soap was widely available, households had to get creative. Alongside wood ash, which produces an alkaline solution when soaked in water, people sometimes turned to the chamber pot for help with the laundry. As urine aged, a substance in it called urea broke down into ammonia, a strong-smelling chemical that works as a mild alkali. That helped dissolve fats and loosen dirt from fabric. Combined with the lye made from ash and a good deal of elbow grease — a vigorous dunking in tubs, rivers or streams — it made an effective early cleaning system.

Bathing was treated as a risk

Early modern physicians were fascinated by the body's pores. Many believed that bathing in warm water could open them so widely that harmful vapours or corrupted air might get in. William Vaughan, who wrote treatises on medicine in the seventeenth century, worried that if pores could let sweat out, they could let unhealthy substances in. He did not say people should give up bathing altogether, only that they should not bathe "excessively" — a bath counted as excessive if it opened the pores too much and disrupted the body's natural balance. He also warned against "the closing or stopping of the pores: which happens by immoderate anointing".

Once a week was thought plenty

Victorian ideas about washing pulled in two directions. One health text from the 1860s stated: "Once a week is often enough to bathe the whole body for the purpose of luxury or cleanliness." The same passage explained that the oil produced by glands in the skin lubricates its surface, and warned that very frequent bathing of the whole body would use up this protective substance. Other writers disagreed. Andrew White Tuer's late-Victorian book Luxurious Bathing argued that bathing could be "renovating to enfeebled constitutions".

Hair was not to be washed too often either

Nineteenth-century hair care manuals warned against washing the hair too frequently, wetting the scalp unnecessarily and exposing the head to cold afterwards. George Thomas Jackson's A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of the Hair and Scalp, published in 1887, repeatedly cautions against excessive washing, because wet hair was believed to make people susceptible to chills, as well as nerve pain and other nervous complaints. Brushing was the recommended alternative. Beauty manuals often advised 100 brush strokes morning and night, a routine believed to remove dust and loose skin, carry away excess oil and stimulate circulation.

What these habits share is a belief that the body's balance could be protected or upset by what was put on it, or left on it.