March 14, 2023 • 48 mins
The idea of healing via immersion in sacred or special waters dates back to prehistory, and it’s still alive and well in the modern world. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe consider the myth, history and reality and healing waters.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. And today
we wanted to kick off a series examining something I
(00:23):
recently became interested in due to a specific historical anecdote,
which we're going to get to in a maybe a
later part in this series. But we're kicking off a
series on a very common belief across many human cultures
throughout history, the belief that you can heal your body
(00:43):
or purge your sicknesses by bathing or soaking in water,
especially in certain places containing special waters, but in many
cases just by bathing in waters or waters of a
certain temperature. Yeah, this is I think a great topic
because it relates to something that everyone has experienced with,
which is soaking in water cold or hot, the you know,
(01:07):
the feeling of feeling restored by such practices. But then
there's it covers a lot of ground as well. We
can go back in time, we can look at different views,
both scientific and superstitious, about what's exactly going on. And
(01:27):
I think it's it's maybe worthwhile to just start off
with just a little general information about bathing itself. And
for this I turned to a book that I have
I've had on the shelf for a long time and
I occasionally turned back to. I remember I read it
in full when it first came out, but it was
from the Oxford University Press, titled Clean, A History of
Personal Hygiene and Purity by Virginia Smith. I brought it up,
(01:51):
at least in passing on the show many times because
I think one of the interesting things about this book
is that it looks just generally an overview at the
history in human culture of on one hand, hygiene and
on the other hand, purity, and how these become intertwined,
and how there's this understanding that cleaning yourself, grooming yourself,
(02:15):
applying cosmetics and whatnot, that it is a way of
in many cases it seems to be a way of
inspiring some sort of health and cleanliness and hygiene. But
also we have all these other ideas that get built
up with it as well. Well. Yeah, bathing has a
lot of symbolic loading and human culture, and I would
imagine that kind of thing goes way way back, especially
because even outside the context of bathing, water just has
(02:37):
a lot of symbolic loading and human culture. Yes, absolutely.
Smith goes into it a lot of cut a bit
in this book. So our prehistoric ancestors would have obviously
valued grooming, grooming being distinct somewhat from from bathing for
our purposes here, but they would have groomed in the
same way that various other primate relatives do. And kind
(02:59):
of a footnote here, Yes, there are certainly primates that
engage in something a little more like bathing, setting in
pools and all. We might have to come back to
that and look at those behaviors in particular. But when
it comes to water, the only real requirements Smith points
out for human beings is fresh drinking water. So we
might swim in water, we might fish in water. There
(03:20):
are certainly other things we might do in and around water,
but we don't need to actually have baths. We don't
need to immerse ourselves in water. But we found water.
We inevitably were curious about water, and so nomadic Neolithic
tribal groups inevitably discovered all kinds of natural waters, including
(03:40):
cold water springs, rivers, and lakes, and they inevitably developed
ideas about their healing properties, and so these waters, there
to be sources of fresh drinking water, maybe fishing waters
in some cases, but you could also engage in soothing
and hygienic washing or immersion in these waters. And those
are just the cold waters to consider. Because on top
(04:01):
of that, then we have the naturally heated waters, hot
springs and so forth, which would have seemed even more
miraculous if they were discovered. I mean, can you imagine
if you'd never encountered hot springs before, or even if
you knew hot springs existed, but you could only have
access to hot water like this naturally occurring, you know,
once a year, twice a year, depending on what your
(04:23):
your cycle of moving around might be. And hot springs
occur around the world, and and Smith points out quote
and hot springs seem to have played a significant role
in human settlement patterns quote. For instance, many, if not most,
of the highly decorated Upper Paleolithic sacred cave systems in
(04:44):
the French Pyrenees and the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain
are within walking distance of important hot spring sites, also
later exploited by the Romans. That is interesting, I'd never
read that before. So there is a correlation between evidence
of habitation by prehistoric peoples and proximity to hot springs. Yeah,
(05:07):
and I think I've encountered this in other sources as well,
making the argument that is, these people's inevitably moved around
in order to survive, and you know, follow their food sources.
If there was a hot spring in proximity to where
they might stay, all the better. If there's a hot
spring on the way of point A to point B,
all the better. Now, it's probably difficult to figure out
(05:30):
at what point immersion in these waters would have taken
on cultural associations with healing or with wellness of the body,
because you know, use of those sources could also just
be for relaxation, for recreation, or for hygiene, right right,
But then, of course, in the human mind and the
human imagination, how quickly do any of those categories potentially
(05:52):
touch on the sacred Right? When does relaxation then become meditation,
When does hygiene become purity, etc. So Smith writes that
washing and bathing properly likely began during the Neolithic period
and late Neolithic technology tackle the problems of water heating, storage,
and draining as they took the experience of these baths
(06:13):
out of their natural environment during stretches of greater stability, prosperity,
and surplus, and so a true culture of bathing evolves,
as do various ideas about the benefits of bathing. And again,
this kind of runs the gamut. You can imagine it
being just entirely subjective experiences, actual hygienic value, and then
(06:36):
supernatural ideas and everything in between. Smith also points out
that it connects with a very old notion that the
human body is unfinished and that it is left to
us to clothe, adorn, groom, and apply cosmetics in order
to finish ourselves to a level that meets individual and
(06:57):
or cultural expectations. And this is an idea that the
author comes back to again and again. And on one hand,
it might seem like an overstatement of the obvious, like
if I'm you know you wake up in the morning,
you're not fully ready, or you know you're naked, you're
not fully prepared for the world. But this takes it
a step a step further, considering the idea that you
(07:18):
were not finished until you have done these things, like
like they're sort of a base level of who you
are and what a human being is, but then there
has to be this cultural extension to meet this ideal
or as ideal of a self as one can achieve
in the sort of real world. This raises a really
interesting idea that I don't think I'd ever considered before,
(07:40):
which is that in a sense, you could think of
bathing as a form of body modification. So in its
natural state, just living your life, your body is going
to be covered in various substances, and you know, bits
of dust and dirt from the environment, and with oils
that are naturally coming from your skin and all the
other things that accumulate through living your life. By bathing
(08:03):
and removing those things from the outer layer of your skin,
you're in a way changing yourself much in the same
way that somebody might be changing themselves by say, applying
a tattoo or anything like that. Oh absolutely, yeah, I mean,
without even getting into the higher levels of tattoos and
cosmetics that like, just altering your body hair changes your appearance.
(08:26):
But also, as pointed out, and we'll get to this
example in a bit, like there are cases where hair
removal has an impact then on the potentiality for lice,
So you are potentially augmenting your parasite load, which is
not something you need. Bathing and any kind of hygiene
culture for obviously mere grooming in non human animals also
(08:47):
can can do the same thing, and many other animals
have some sort of a of a parasite to regulation
practice in their habits. But yeah, it's fascinating to think
about all of this, and I feel like you can
see the basic template of healing waters in a refreshing
hot shower or bath in all of this, so the
experience relaxes or perks you up. It's hygienic. But there
(09:10):
is also this long human history again of associating physical
hygiene with spiritual purity, and in bathing our incomplete body,
we elevate it to a level at least just beyond
the naturally occurring world, if not like maybe a few
steps beyond the natural world, and we feel restored, we
feel capable of dealing with I guess life in general,
(09:31):
if not particular obstacles. Well, yes, and when it comes
specifically to hot waters. This is not based on any
kind of scientific theory I'm aware of, but I just
I personally have thought before that it seems to me
there is a correlation between visible rising gases or visible
(09:52):
amounts of particle matter rising in the air, and spiritual
beliefs or beliefs about about sort of hidden mechanisms of power.
So think about how many religious rituals or beliefs about
hidden mechanisms of power are associated with smoke or steam
or anything else that you see rising and floating through
(10:13):
the air. Oh yeah, absolutely, it's a short step between
so many things about about bathing in hotter cold waters
to get to some sort of a spiritual interpretation or
some sort of tradition of sacred waters. Like I was,
I was just thinking about this. You know, you get
into either cold water or hotter water, warm water to
(10:33):
hot water, and one of the things you're gonna experience
is you're gonna have sort of a full body experience
all of that cold or off that heat, and it's
like literally going to put you back into the experience
of your body more. You know, you're gonna be You're
gonna at least have a better shot at experiencing the now,
just because the ambient temperature touching your entire skin is
(10:55):
not just air temperature. Now, one problem you're going to
encounter in the series, since we're talking about beliefs about
the healing power of immersion in water. Is that this
subject has the potential to be somewhat confusing because it
touches on many different related, sometimes overlapping beliefs and practices,
(11:17):
both supernatural and natural, both ancient and modern, both outlandish
and mundane. So to sort out a few common terms
you might encounter in this area, especially in the use
of immersion in water as it is practiced today in
alternative medicine or even in standard medicine, you've got the
(11:39):
term hydrotherapy. This is a general umbrella term that includes
lots of different kinds of treatments, the unifying feature of
which seems to me to be the application of water
to the outside of the body. So many things that
are called hydrotherapy involved immersion in water or somehow applying
(11:59):
water to the outside of the body, maybe by massage
or spraying of some kind. The specific term aquatic therapy
seems more often, as best I can tell, to refer
to a type of physical therapy involving exercises you do
while immersed in water. And it seems to me that
hydrotherapy is again a potentially confusing term because it encompasses
(12:23):
so much and includes some practices which seem to me
to be pretty strongly supported by empirical evidence, maybe as
certain types of physical therapy involving exercises done underwater, But
it also includes all kinds of therapies that seem to
me obviously not to be supported by strong evidence, and
then others which are somewhere in between, maybe where the
(12:45):
evidence is somewhat ambiguous. Yeah. In Smith's book, the author
points out that the term hydrotherapy is usually linked to
eighteenth and nineteenth century European health trends, but then these
trends go in and out of fad even into more
modern times. So if you're seeing it used in like
(13:06):
literature for some sort of health or wellness business, they're
probably not using it in the eighteenth or nineteenth century
a sense of it, but they may it still be
maybe part of that fad. There may be some similar
ideas that are tied up in it. Yes. Now there
are also much more specific terms, such as the term
balneotherapy b al in the O balneotherapy, which is specifically
(13:29):
the treatment of disease by bathing or soaking, often in
specific types or sources of water, such as mineral springs. Yeah,
and Smith dates balneology back at at least to the
ancient Greeks. It's something that's like documented by Homer, but
it was likely centuries old by that point, even influenced
by various cultures. Yeah, and then you've got other things
(13:52):
like a thalassotherapy. This is treatment of disease with seawater.
This is something that apparently plenty of the Elder was
a fan of. We'll get to that a little bit
later in this episode, but you know, plenty of the
elder was like, there is nothing better for health than
salt from seawater and sun. Did we We did an
older episode about drinking seawater, didn't weigh and we touched
(14:12):
us some of these these fats basically, don't don't actually
do it. Don't go drink a bunch of seawater because
you heard it casually mentioned, right, thank so. In the series,
even though we will inevitably brush up against related topics,
(14:34):
we're going to try to focus mainly on various bal
neotherapeutic beliefs and legends, beliefs about the healing powers of
soaking or bathing, and especially the belief that there are
specific places with waters that heal when you bathe or
soak in them. And beyond exploring these legends themselves, I'm
interested in the question, are there any cases where there's
(14:57):
empirical evidence that's soaking or bathing can actually have a
healing effect, and if so, how does that work? All right,
let's get into ancient myths and legends a little bit
here to sort of lay some of the crown work.
It's kind of an interesting place to look at in
times where the history sort of breaks down and look
at some sort of general ideas about where some of
(15:20):
these ideas came from and their importance to especially to
ancient peoples. So, just concerning Greek myth, Smith points out
to the gods Apollo and Artemis were closely associated with
sacred cold springs. But then to me anyway, a kind
of unexpected figure emerges as kind of a hot spring
(15:40):
and hydraulics technology. Hero I was not expecting to think
about Hercules or Heracles in this regard. Oh, Heracles is
kind of a hot spring mascot in some cases, yeah,
hot springs, but also just like harnessing the power of water,
So he is a sociated with the invention of hot
(16:01):
springs and Greek tradition this is after he was thrown
into the pool at Thermopoli and regained his strength following
the completion of his labors. Strong association here between virility
and hot springs. Apparently, these hot sulfur springs in particular
were also considered a gateway to the realm of Hades. Now,
as for other myths about Heracles and water, I mean,
(16:25):
I think the one that should come to everyone's mind,
in part because we talked about it in Weird Alt
Cinema if you listen to our Weird Alt Cinema episodes,
is the cleaning of the Gigean stables, the foulest stables
and all the land. This is one of the challenges
that Hercules had to deal with. This was of course,
as one of his labors. And how does he clean
them out? Well, he just redirects a river through them.
(16:47):
That's smart thinking. Yeah, it's interesting because I never really
thought about it too much. I just figured, well, this
is the kind of thing that a very strong but
a very clever hero would do. Right. But yeah, you
think about redirecting rivers and all you're getting into like
the work of canals, and ultimately hydraulic technology. Though, actually,
(17:09):
when you think about it, I mean, if you've ever
observed what happens when floodwaters go through a building, they
do not actually clean it out. They make it quite filthy,
right right. But nowadays, if you're cleaning out stables, you're
probably using redirected water one way or another in the process.
Even if you're not just absolutely hosing everything out, you know,
(17:29):
you're having to use other tools, etc. Now Heracles slash
Hercules also has some other encounters with various river gods
and certainly water entities. But the other big one from
the labors is the slaying of the Hydra, which was
a water monster, and so this connection is not lost
on other scholars that ran across the paper titled Heracles
(17:51):
and Hydraulics by J. V. Loose from two thousand and six,
And this paper points out that both the stables and
the Hydra are essentially hydraulic labors, and the author contends
that there is a connection here between Heracles and late
Heltic water technology and water management. So it's almost like
we could think of him as the kind of the
(18:12):
kind of like an ancient Greek saint of water technology. Wow,
they're seeing Hercules in a whole new ways, the King
of Wet. Yeah. Anyway, going back to Smith, though, you
have you also just have to realize you have various
ancient cultures that prize both naturally occurring hot and cold
springs and or the utilization and development of technologies to
(18:32):
artificially recreate these experiences in the home or in you know,
some homes or adjacent to the home, or in some
sort of communal setting. And you know, I would I
would refer back to some of our invention episodes that
deal with various hydraulic technologies and plumbing and so forth,
and inevitably if you would probably be surprised at just
(18:56):
how far back some examples of these technologies really go.
Smith also shares a couple of great examples in the
book related to divine baths of the ancient worlds. So
these again are not we're not necessarily talking talking about
naturally occurring waters here. We're talking about some sort of
prepared water, or in some cases there's not even something
(19:18):
in the real world. It's just again purely getting into
religion and mythology. But first of all, in ancient Egypt,
ancient Egyptian priests who along with keeping their bodies shaved,
and this had to do with lies apparently, and oiled.
Also bathed in cold water twice each day and twice
each night to help maintain this kind of ideal higher
(19:40):
body that befit one in contact with the divine. If
you're more familiar with Bible traditions, those also include various
kinds of ritual bathing in preparation for say, entrance into
the temple or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, people are
always having baths or getting their feet cleaned by Jesus
that It's just there's a lot of it, and there's
(20:01):
so many examples from so many cultures, you know, because again,
these ideas of hygiene and purity becomes so wound up
with each other. Now, the pharaoh himself didn't have to
go through all this was not taken necessarily two cold
baths a day and two at night, but still certainly
had an extremely high standard of personal grooming and was
purified via some sort of a bathing ritual at birth,
(20:25):
at death, and then in the afterlife as well, according
to their beliefs. So Smith writes that in the afterlife
it was said that he would be bathed, fumigated, shaved
and oiled by the goddess Nut. I believe Smith doesn't
specify the goddess, but I believe it's Nut in this case,
and this would not only clean but revive him. Quote
(20:48):
he received his bones of metal and stretched out his
indestructible limbs. His body came together and was entirely refashioned. WHOA,
So that's that's a heck of a bath, like physically
reassembles your body into some sort of unbreakable form for
the afterlife. And you have plenty of other examples of this,
(21:09):
but just one in passing here. Homer has a whole
bit in the Iliad describing the goddess Hera cleaning herself,
putting on cosmetics. So even the gods in some traditions
have to strive to achieve the finnished body, just like
mortals do. I guess they have a better starting place,
but they still have to do things to reach this
(21:30):
ideal level of godhood. Yeah, And speaking of Homer and
the Iliad, this brings us to the role of bathing,
and especially medicinal bathing in Greek and Roman culture, which,
though by no means the only culture is to employ
these practices, we're lucky to have a lot of sources
(21:51):
on so I wanted to turn to a paper called
Water and Spas in the Classical World, published in the
journal Medical History in nineteen ninety by an author named
Ralph Jackson. I looked him up. Jackson was a scholar
working at the time for the Department of Prehistoric and
Romano British Antiquities at the British Museum, and it might
(22:12):
not come as a surprise to listeners here that one
major source consulted on this matter is Plenty of the
Elder in his Natural History, who in book thirty one writes,
quote everywhere in many lands gush fourth beneficent waters here cold,
they're hot. They're both in some places tepid and lukewarm,
promising relief to the sick. And so Jackson writes that
(22:34):
in the first century CE, the time of Plenty's writing,
the Roman Empire had many spas, which they called aqui,
and there at the time this paper was published, there
was thought to be written evidence of references to roughly
one hundred or so unique spa locations, places usually fed
(22:55):
by natural springs. Many of these, at the time of
writing had not been physically located or excavated by by
modern scholars. At some Roman spa locations, we know where
they are, though it seems the springs have run dry
at other places. There's basically been continuous usage since ancient times,
I believe Smith, and this was a book from two
(23:16):
thousand and seven, so I'm not sure where the where
the account still stands, but Smith writes that some four
hundred major bath sites from the from out the area
outside of Rome had been found, but still more, of
course we're completely unearthed. So going into Jackson's overview of
the Greek and Roman medicinal uses of water, he writes
(23:38):
that if you go farthest back in Greek history to
like the home Eric period, which is literary period from
before the classical Greek period, bathing facilities were mainly associated
at this point with just hygiene and comfort. So if
you're a rich person, an important part of being a
good host is providing bath waters for your guests. But
(23:59):
by the time time of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates,
like the fifth to the fourth century BC, it seems
bathing had come to signify more than just cleanliness and comfort.
Bathing was part of medicine, and so many Greeks of
this period saw bathing, specifically the use of hot and
cold bathwater as a way to regulate the bodily humors.
(24:22):
Now we've gone into a lot more detail on humoral
theory in the past in other episodes, but in very
short order, Humorism is an obsolete medical theory that traced
to health and disease to the balance or proportion of
four fluids also known as humors within the body. Yeah,
(24:43):
black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. This was thought
to explain a range of facts about a person and
interesting note, there are still artifacts of this way of
thinking in our language today. So when you maybe describe
a person's temperament as sanguine or as phlegmatic, you are
(25:03):
referring to flim and blood blood the sanguine fluid these.
This is based on the humor theory of personality. So
under the system, your personality or your current mood could
be explained by humoral equilibrium. Maybe your depression is a
result of too much black bile, etc. But diseases of
(25:25):
the body somatic diseases could also be explained by an
imbalance of these four fluids, and the four humors were
each associated with various states of hot or cold and
wet or dry. So, for example, yellow bile was hot
and dry, blood was hot and wet, black bile was
(25:45):
cold and dry, and flegm was cold and wet. And
according to some ancient Greek physicians like Hippocrates, one way
to help regulate your humorl balance would be to heat
the body, cool the body, moisten it, or dry it. Yeah,
and even today you go to any kind of like
robust spa situation, you have various means at your disposal
(26:07):
to tinker with those settings, right, yeah, yeah, you can
tweak the knobs. Now. While the humoral framework may have
occasionally produced apparent healings or apparently good results, we know
today these probably would have been due to placebo effect
or maybe in some cases just happy accidents. Humoral theory
has no general factual basis. But this did not stop
(26:31):
bathing from becoming and remaining an extremely popular treatment for
disease and ill health for centuries all throughout the classical
Greek and Roman regions. Why would this be well? Jackson
offers an observation that this is not proof of exactly
why it worked this way, But Jackson writes quote, baths
were both pleasant and by the Roman Imperial period at
(26:53):
least comparatively freely available. So they were just pleasant. They're
just nice, They felt good, and you could easily get
to a bath. These are a couple of features shared
by not all, but many popular alternative medical treatments to
this day. You might notice like there may be no
real evidence that this essential oil has a direct mechanism
(27:15):
of action against I don't know what you're arthritis, but
it's relatively cheap to get, it's easy to get, and
it smells nice, which makes you feel good, so you
know that it's not hard to see why it would
be a popular treatment. It also feels I think we've
talked about this before. It also checks off that box
of something is happening, like a really strong smelling oil,
(27:37):
or certainly just a very hot shower very or even
just a very cold shower, etc. Like it. There's a
certain shock to the system that occurs that that you
if you lean into any kind of expectation, well then
there you have it. There is that surely the effect observed. Yeah,
it makes you feel something different or sense something different,
(27:57):
which helps create the feeling that something is happening. In
your body. Yeah. So, the ancient Greeks and Romans had
a number of different beliefs about the medicinal and therapeutic
uses of baths. But just to cite a few examples
(28:18):
featured in this paper, warm water was often believed to
help with the absorption of nutrients from food because it
quote softened the bather's body. I don't know why I
found this image so funny, but I did. I was
trying to think, why would you think of it that way,
softening the body to absorb nutrients better? And I wondered,
(28:39):
maybe this is similar to observing something from food like
that kind of warm concoctions or warm doughs tend to
emulsify and absorb ingredients more easily. I don't know. Yeah, yeah,
just speculating there. Then again, I don't know how cold
their dough in ancient Rome would ever get. I mean,
they didn't have refrigerators. Well, if you're if you're in
(29:00):
water long enough, of course you do get you get
kind of wrinkly, right, Yeah, you could maybe be seen
as a softening of the skin. Yeah. But also hot
water baths were thought to treat symptoms from pneumonia, including
back in chest pain, to treat fatigue, headaches, and trouble
with urination, to encourage urination. But in Roman times, public
(29:22):
baths were also important and complex community facilities. I think
it's very important to understand the like the many different
roles they combined, and how important they were for a
local community. Their function was at once hygienic, social, recreational,
(29:43):
and medicinal. So according to Jackson, for example, you know
you might go to the baths for hygiene and grooming.
So you're going to go there to wash your body.
Of course, you can bathe in the water, but you
can also get your skin scraped. They had these instruments
called strigeles where they'd like kind of it wouldn't be
exactly shaving, but kind of scraping you down with a
blade to get like oil and dirt off your skin,
(30:05):
and then they would, you know, maybe apply a new
perfumed oil to you. You could also get your hair
taken care of. You can get unwanted hair removed. You
might also go to this bath for exercise, so in
a way be kind of like a gym. You also
go there to hang out and socialize with friends. You
could get a massage, or you could treat your diseases
or get advice about diet or health. So it combines
(30:28):
all these different things. It's got elements of a gym,
a barber shop, like a ymca with a pool and
hot tubs. It's got a hospital or a clinic, and
a public bathing facility just all together into one. Yeah,
for many people it becomes just a center of their
social life. I remember we did an Invention episode about
(30:50):
the invention of toilets, and one of the really funny
things was the Roman facilities that had apparently just like
social toilets where people go, you know, sit on a latrine,
but it's just a row of them all in the line,
where people would just hang out, I guess, and chat
while they're pooping. You know. I um, this is I
(31:11):
have nothing to back this up at, but I do
wonder like maybe they had curtains and the curtains didn't survive,
Like what would what would people make of a bathroom
today where the stalls had been removed and they were like,
they might think, we'll look at this. They just had
one toilet next to another. They just walk in and
there are the toilets. Oh maybe I don't know, but
I mean probably probably not, probably not, But there are
also many specific examples of ancient authors prescribing hot or
(31:36):
cold baths for different medical complaints. So one figure talked
about in this paper is named Esclepiadis, who was an
ancient Greek physician who worked in Rome and lived from
like the one twenties BCD about forty BC. And Esclepiadis
advised the use of baths as a treatment for the
(31:57):
sick and preventative medicine for the healthy. And though it
seems prescriptions for hot water baths were generally more common
at the time, a Sclepiadis was known for advising cold water,
which led plenty of the elder to refer to him
with the nickname the cold water Giver. One of his
followers Antonius Musa, so this is a guy who came
(32:19):
up in the school of a. Sclepiadis. Even famously treated
the Emperor Caesar Augustus with cold baths, and this is
chronicled in Suetonius's biography Life of Augustus, in which he writes,
and this is a translation by J. C. Rolfe quote,
in the course of his life he suffered from several
severe and dangerous illnesses, especially after the subjugation of Cantabria,
(32:42):
when he was in such a desperate plight from abscesses
of the liver that he was forced to submit to
an unprecedented and hazardous course of treatment. Since hot fomentations
gave him no relief, he was led by the advice
of his physician Antonius Mussa to try cold ones. So
it's getting cold baths for abscesses of the liver, and
(33:03):
the use of this treatment by the emperor led to
fame and riches for Antonius Musa and led the cold
water treatment to become somewhat fashionable. In fact, this is
another thing I think we can see patterns of today's
you know, like a one celebrity gets some particular type
of surgery or does some kind of health trend or something,
(33:23):
and it becomes fashionable, a bunch of other people want
to pick up on it. And in the case of
cold baths for the liver, some practitioners at the time
even advise patients to bathe in cold water during the
depths of winter. So they took it seriously. Oh we
On the other hand, you had the Roman physician Kelsis.
I think sometimes maybe pronounce celsus celsus, but I think
(33:44):
those romans cs are supposed to be a hard case sounds,
so I'm going to say Kelsis recommended baths is a
treatment for quote skin complaints, diseases of sinews, gout wounds,
digestive disorders, wasting diseases, eye diseases, and fevers, as well
as in convalescence after surgery. And Kelsis here did not
(34:06):
agree with the Sclepiades and Musa on cold baths for
abscesses of the liver. Kelsis recommended hot baths and said
quote all cold things must be especially avoided. So you
get different schools of thought. There's also an ancient school
of medicine at this time known as the Methodists, and
this might be obvious, but no relation at all to
the Christian denomination. They were just called Methodists. They were
(34:30):
named after their supposed adherence to the method. They were
fond of recommending baths and mineral springs, not just for
immersion but also for drinking. And the Methodist idea of
physiology seems a little hard to understand. I wasn't familiar
with it before I was reading and trying to put
it together. Jackson explains it by saying that they classified
(34:51):
diseases into either acute or chronic, so to an extent
we still do that today, but that they saw the
cause of disease as stemming from either excessive constriction or
excessive relaxation, and that baths could be used to treat
these states. So, for example, the Methodist physician named Sournus
(35:13):
of Ephesus, who lived from the first to the second
century CE, thought baths were an important treatment for inducing
relaxation and patients whose diseases were caused by too much constriction,
and he also advised the use of hot baths for
women in later stages of pregnancy. Now, most of what
I've been talking about up to this point has been
(35:33):
focused on ancient Greek and Roman beliefs about the medicinal
or therapeutic uses of hot or cold baths in general,
but there were also beliefs about the special healing properties
of specific waters the sites often called spas, such as
sulfur springs, alum springs, bitumen springs, alkaline and acid springs,
(35:55):
as well as of seawater, which, as I mentioned earlier,
plenty endorsed as being you know, there's nothing more beneficial
for the body than salt. And I think we're going
to come back to more thoughts about these specific water
sources and their associated spas in the next episode or
later in the series. But I couldn't leave it off
here without a taste of a brief reading from Plenty
(36:16):
of the Elder in the Natural History book thirty one,
about people who take it a little too far, who
get a little too excited about the alleged healing powers
of the spa. So are you ready for this, yes,
Plenty rights. Sulfur waters, however, are good for the sinews,
alum waters for paralysis and similar cases of collapse. Waters
(36:37):
containing bitumen and soda, such as those of Cutilia, are
good for drinking and as a purge. Many people make
a matter of boasting the great number of hours they
can endure the heat of these sulfur waters, a very
injurious practice, for one should remain in them a little
longer than in the bath afterwards, rents in cool fresh water,
(36:59):
and not go away without a rubbing of oil. The
common people find these details irksome, and so there is
no greater risk to health than this treatment. Because an
overpowering smell goes to the head, which sweats and is
seized with chill, while the rest of the body is immersed.
Those make a like mistake who boast of the great
(37:19):
quantity they can drink. I have seen some already swollen
with drinking to such an extent that their rings were
covered by skin since they could not avoid the vast
amount of water they had swallowed. So it is not
good to drink these waters without a frequent taste of salt.
It's back on the salt again, said, that's the problem
(37:42):
people go into the spa that they're like, they sit
in the sulfur water too long, it goes to their head.
But then they're also like, I'm gonna drink all this
spa water. I'm gonna drink so much that you won't
be able to see my jewelry anymore. My rings will
disappear between swollen skin and the problem I didn't get
some salt in between. That's the problem. I mean, I
(38:02):
love this because also there is some sound advice here.
I mean, obviously, if you drink too much water that
can hurt you. And also if you stay in some
sort of a hot tub or a sauna or steam
room situation longer than advised. You can also run up
against some ill consequences. So you know, at heart there's
(38:25):
some good advice here and just not necessarily a modern
understanding of exactly what the risks are. No, I totally agree.
Actually plenty is giving sound advice. That is right, my
sound advice. And this is why MCA advice is, don't
get into a conversation with a talkative old fella in
the sauna, because that guy, no matter how nice he is,
(38:46):
he can inevitably sustain enhanced temperatures for far longer than
you can, and it will be harder and harder to
tear yourself away as you become overheated, and while trying
to main polite and nodding your head to their stories.
That is also sage advice, if I may say, Pliny
(39:07):
and caliber. But like I said, we'll come back to
discuss some more specific mineral springs and spas and localized
water traditions in the next episodes. Now, I do want
to come back to Virginia Smith for just a little bit,
because the author has an entire chapter on the Roman
baths and I just wanted to run through some bits
(39:28):
here that may shed some additional light on, So what
we've been talking about. First of all, Smith writes that
the Romans were heavily influenced by the Greek concept of
the managed life, which seems to line up fairly closely
with this idea of the finished body. But in both
cases Greeks and Romans, but especially the Romans, bathing was
also part of politics and state craft. So again, I mean,
(39:52):
part of it comes down to like where are you
hanging out, but also it gets tied up in these
just ideas of culture, and with the Romans, the Roman
bath becomes part of their civilizing process. Yes, I get
the sense that for the Romans, like having a good
local bath facility was part of kind of town pride.
(40:15):
It was a part of like what made you show
that your society was sophisticated and powerful. Yeah. Yeah, So
the Roman elite, they certainly had their baths and like
their bath, but they also somewhat erratically over time, spent
money on healthy services for the people that included public baths,
along with other things like town doctors, sports programs. Kind
(40:36):
of getting getting into that where you're talking about with
the idea of the Roman bath as being this gymnasium
slash limscas you know, and everything else. These programs, Smith rights,
would have only impacted about a quarter of Roman imperial residents,
those living in cities and regular bathers, so those two
things had to line up. But that's still quite a
(40:58):
lot of cleanliness for the time period. And Smith writes
that quote urban Roman life would have been inconceivable and
a lot more feted and visibly filthy without the various
public baths, latrains, fountains and taps served by the Roman aqueducts.
And that, of course is that's a whole issue in
and of itself. Like to power all of this, you
(41:18):
need to be able to control the water. You need
to be able to bring the water where you need
it to be, and the aqueducts were a huge engineering
victory on that front. Also, you need you need a
good sewer system, and when they worked, the Cloaca or
the Roman sewers were also an essential part of the system.
(41:39):
This reminds me of our invention episode on the toilet.
You know, when you're tracing the history of the flushing toilet,
it's one thing to be able to supply it with water,
quite another to have a good drainage or sewage system
to back it up, right, Yeah, I mean I think
you could argue that when it comes to waste disposal technology,
the good drainage or sew or system is the more
(42:01):
important element than the toilet itself. Yeah. So, like, like
we were saying that the baths were an essential part
of Roman life, and Smith points out that that, Yeah,
in fact, if you look at if there's a decline
of the bath system in a given city, that's generally
a sign of greater economic instability or some other kind
of unrest. Like you can use it as sort of
(42:22):
the you know, the litmus test for how how life
is going in that particular corner of the empire or
the empire as a whole. Now, Smith notes that the
main reason for the Roman public baths was quote pleasure
politics and propaganda rather than disease prevention proper. But the
hygienic impact, while likely marginal, that then margin still might
(42:46):
have been enough to tip the scales in public health. Okay,
but this would be talking about its actual effect on
health rather than perceived effect on health, right right, Like, Like,
how for for all of this bathing and talk of
the humors, like, was it actually making any kind of
an impact on the overall health of a population, and
so probably not to a large degree, but the small
(43:09):
degree to which it did have an impact that might
have been enough to say sort of keep a society
like a little more healthy than normal and maybe just
on the right side of you know, pandemic illness, that
sort of thing. And I don't know if we'll get
into this in the next episode or not, but like
another thing to consider with like the global history of
(43:29):
bath cultures is that at times there does become a
disease fear regarding these places, and sometimes there's a moral
panic regarding these places, and we see that played out
with the popularity of say spas and saunas throughout European history. Now,
the Romans were apparently initially resistant to the Greek idea
(43:51):
of the bath gymnasium. I'm not sure exactly why, but
they eventually gave in between twenty nine and nineteen BC.
According to Smith, whoever was in the Roman culture, we're
saying no, we should not have a gem at the bath.
They're finally they're like, okay, that's fine, we can, we
can have a gem at the bath. I found this
really interesting. So again, a lot of these, the Greek
(44:12):
enthusiasm for baths. This gets inherited and and and co
opted by the Romans. But the Romans were likely so
gung ho for all of this in part because of
a pre existing bath culture connected to the various volcanic
hot springs on the Italian peninsula. Yes, okay, so here
you see we see connections, causal connections between culture and geology. Yeah.
(44:34):
And it's also an important reminder that even if we're
talking about sort of like the importance of Greek bath
culture Roman bath culture, and how these different cultures and
spread to different areas, it's still not a situation where
somebody like Hercules is coming along and saying, hey, guys,
I just invented something. Get this, what have you put
your whole body in warm water? Like? And then everybody's
(44:56):
mind is blown. You know. No, it's it's like these
ideas as would have been widespread already. So any place
that suddenly encounters like the Roman idea of baths, it's
not all completely new to them. There might be it
might they might be stressing some things that were different.
There might be some sort of wrapping for it. You know,
these I say, maybe the ideas of the humors or
something to that effect. But just the idea of enjoying
(45:19):
the benefits of a hot spring or a cold spring,
those are likely already inherent in a given culture for
one reason or another. But then there will also be
different preexisting bathing cultures as well, and Smith includes a
nice example of this. So the Etruscans were apparently all
about small half baths, and they didn't dig communal baths,
(45:40):
even for like families. The Romans thought differently though, and
so and even with the Romans, though, you have the
situation where they had to come around to fully accepting
the idea of the Greek gymnasium bath. So even though
everybody might generally be okay with the idea of bathing
in hot water bathe in cold water, they're going to
(46:01):
be different ideas about particular benefits or how you should
go about doing these things culturally. And then again we
get into the geography again, which sites are important, which
sites are important within a given culture, and then which
sites end up being co opted by cultures that the
takeover a given area in vada given area, or just
(46:22):
over the long course of time, become dominant in a
period that once had different ideas. All right, well, I
think we're going to have to call it there for
part one of the series, but we will be back
next time to discuss more about the healing waters. Yeah,
certainly in the meantime, if you have anything you want
to write in about concerning traditions of healing waters or
just experiences with pleasant waters. If you want to talk
(46:46):
about particularly great springs, you've been to that sort of thing,
and we're always interested in that. I don't know how
much we'll be able to get into various cultures in
the episode or episodes ahead on this topic, So yeah,
if there's something near and dear to your heart right in,
we'd love to talk about it on a listener Mail episode.
Those listener Mail episodes, by the way, come out on Mondays,
(47:07):
our core episodes of Stuff to blow your mincament on
Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do a short form
artifact or monster fact, and on Weird House Cinema on Fridays,
we just take a little time to talk about a
weird film. Huge thanks to our audio producer J J. Paseway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other. To suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
(47:28):
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
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visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening
to your favorite shows. The
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. And today
we wanted to kick off a series examining something I
(00:23):
recently became interested in due to a specific historical anecdote,
which we're going to get to in a maybe a
later part in this series. But we're kicking off a
series on a very common belief across many human cultures
throughout history, the belief that you can heal your body
(00:43):
or purge your sicknesses by bathing or soaking in water,
especially in certain places containing special waters, but in many
cases just by bathing in waters or waters of a
certain temperature. Yeah, this is I think a great topic
because it relates to something that everyone has experienced with,
which is soaking in water cold or hot, the you know,
(01:07):
the feeling of feeling restored by such practices. But then
there's it covers a lot of ground as well. We
can go back in time, we can look at different views,
both scientific and superstitious, about what's exactly going on. And
(01:27):
I think it's it's maybe worthwhile to just start off
with just a little general information about bathing itself. And
for this I turned to a book that I have
I've had on the shelf for a long time and
I occasionally turned back to. I remember I read it
in full when it first came out, but it was
from the Oxford University Press, titled Clean, A History of
Personal Hygiene and Purity by Virginia Smith. I brought it up,
(01:51):
at least in passing on the show many times because
I think one of the interesting things about this book
is that it looks just generally an overview at the
history in human culture of on one hand, hygiene and
on the other hand, purity, and how these become intertwined,
and how there's this understanding that cleaning yourself, grooming yourself,
(02:15):
applying cosmetics and whatnot, that it is a way of
in many cases it seems to be a way of
inspiring some sort of health and cleanliness and hygiene. But
also we have all these other ideas that get built
up with it as well. Well. Yeah, bathing has a
lot of symbolic loading and human culture, and I would
imagine that kind of thing goes way way back, especially
because even outside the context of bathing, water just has
(02:37):
a lot of symbolic loading and human culture. Yes, absolutely.
Smith goes into it a lot of cut a bit
in this book. So our prehistoric ancestors would have obviously
valued grooming, grooming being distinct somewhat from from bathing for
our purposes here, but they would have groomed in the
same way that various other primate relatives do. And kind
(02:59):
of a footnote here, Yes, there are certainly primates that
engage in something a little more like bathing, setting in
pools and all. We might have to come back to
that and look at those behaviors in particular. But when
it comes to water, the only real requirements Smith points
out for human beings is fresh drinking water. So we
might swim in water, we might fish in water. There
(03:20):
are certainly other things we might do in and around water,
but we don't need to actually have baths. We don't
need to immerse ourselves in water. But we found water.
We inevitably were curious about water, and so nomadic Neolithic
tribal groups inevitably discovered all kinds of natural waters, including
(03:40):
cold water springs, rivers, and lakes, and they inevitably developed
ideas about their healing properties, and so these waters, there
to be sources of fresh drinking water, maybe fishing waters
in some cases, but you could also engage in soothing
and hygienic washing or immersion in these waters. And those
are just the cold waters to consider. Because on top
(04:01):
of that, then we have the naturally heated waters, hot
springs and so forth, which would have seemed even more
miraculous if they were discovered. I mean, can you imagine
if you'd never encountered hot springs before, or even if
you knew hot springs existed, but you could only have
access to hot water like this naturally occurring, you know,
once a year, twice a year, depending on what your
(04:23):
your cycle of moving around might be. And hot springs
occur around the world, and and Smith points out quote
and hot springs seem to have played a significant role
in human settlement patterns quote. For instance, many, if not most,
of the highly decorated Upper Paleolithic sacred cave systems in
(04:44):
the French Pyrenees and the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain
are within walking distance of important hot spring sites, also
later exploited by the Romans. That is interesting, I'd never
read that before. So there is a correlation between evidence
of habitation by prehistoric peoples and proximity to hot springs. Yeah,
(05:07):
and I think I've encountered this in other sources as well,
making the argument that is, these people's inevitably moved around
in order to survive, and you know, follow their food sources.
If there was a hot spring in proximity to where
they might stay, all the better. If there's a hot
spring on the way of point A to point B,
all the better. Now, it's probably difficult to figure out
(05:30):
at what point immersion in these waters would have taken
on cultural associations with healing or with wellness of the body,
because you know, use of those sources could also just
be for relaxation, for recreation, or for hygiene, right right,
But then, of course, in the human mind and the
human imagination, how quickly do any of those categories potentially
(05:52):
touch on the sacred Right? When does relaxation then become meditation,
When does hygiene become purity, etc. So Smith writes that
washing and bathing properly likely began during the Neolithic period
and late Neolithic technology tackle the problems of water heating, storage,
and draining as they took the experience of these baths
(06:13):
out of their natural environment during stretches of greater stability, prosperity,
and surplus, and so a true culture of bathing evolves,
as do various ideas about the benefits of bathing. And again,
this kind of runs the gamut. You can imagine it
being just entirely subjective experiences, actual hygienic value, and then
(06:36):
supernatural ideas and everything in between. Smith also points out
that it connects with a very old notion that the
human body is unfinished and that it is left to
us to clothe, adorn, groom, and apply cosmetics in order
to finish ourselves to a level that meets individual and
(06:57):
or cultural expectations. And this is an idea that the
author comes back to again and again. And on one hand,
it might seem like an overstatement of the obvious, like
if I'm you know you wake up in the morning,
you're not fully ready, or you know you're naked, you're
not fully prepared for the world. But this takes it
a step a step further, considering the idea that you
(07:18):
were not finished until you have done these things, like
like they're sort of a base level of who you
are and what a human being is, but then there
has to be this cultural extension to meet this ideal
or as ideal of a self as one can achieve
in the sort of real world. This raises a really
interesting idea that I don't think I'd ever considered before,
(07:40):
which is that in a sense, you could think of
bathing as a form of body modification. So in its
natural state, just living your life, your body is going
to be covered in various substances, and you know, bits
of dust and dirt from the environment, and with oils
that are naturally coming from your skin and all the
other things that accumulate through living your life. By bathing
(08:03):
and removing those things from the outer layer of your skin,
you're in a way changing yourself much in the same
way that somebody might be changing themselves by say, applying
a tattoo or anything like that. Oh absolutely, yeah, I mean,
without even getting into the higher levels of tattoos and
cosmetics that like, just altering your body hair changes your appearance.
(08:26):
But also, as pointed out, and we'll get to this
example in a bit, like there are cases where hair
removal has an impact then on the potentiality for lice,
So you are potentially augmenting your parasite load, which is
not something you need. Bathing and any kind of hygiene
culture for obviously mere grooming in non human animals also
(08:47):
can can do the same thing, and many other animals
have some sort of a of a parasite to regulation
practice in their habits. But yeah, it's fascinating to think
about all of this, and I feel like you can
see the basic template of healing waters in a refreshing
hot shower or bath in all of this, so the
experience relaxes or perks you up. It's hygienic. But there
(09:10):
is also this long human history again of associating physical
hygiene with spiritual purity, and in bathing our incomplete body,
we elevate it to a level at least just beyond
the naturally occurring world, if not like maybe a few
steps beyond the natural world, and we feel restored, we
feel capable of dealing with I guess life in general,
(09:31):
if not particular obstacles. Well, yes, and when it comes
specifically to hot waters. This is not based on any
kind of scientific theory I'm aware of, but I just
I personally have thought before that it seems to me
there is a correlation between visible rising gases or visible
(09:52):
amounts of particle matter rising in the air, and spiritual
beliefs or beliefs about about sort of hidden mechanisms of power.
So think about how many religious rituals or beliefs about
hidden mechanisms of power are associated with smoke or steam
or anything else that you see rising and floating through
(10:13):
the air. Oh yeah, absolutely, it's a short step between
so many things about about bathing in hotter cold waters
to get to some sort of a spiritual interpretation or
some sort of tradition of sacred waters. Like I was,
I was just thinking about this. You know, you get
into either cold water or hotter water, warm water to
(10:33):
hot water, and one of the things you're gonna experience
is you're gonna have sort of a full body experience
all of that cold or off that heat, and it's
like literally going to put you back into the experience
of your body more. You know, you're gonna be You're
gonna at least have a better shot at experiencing the now,
just because the ambient temperature touching your entire skin is
(10:55):
not just air temperature. Now, one problem you're going to
encounter in the series, since we're talking about beliefs about
the healing power of immersion in water. Is that this
subject has the potential to be somewhat confusing because it
touches on many different related, sometimes overlapping beliefs and practices,
(11:17):
both supernatural and natural, both ancient and modern, both outlandish
and mundane. So to sort out a few common terms
you might encounter in this area, especially in the use
of immersion in water as it is practiced today in
alternative medicine or even in standard medicine, you've got the
(11:39):
term hydrotherapy. This is a general umbrella term that includes
lots of different kinds of treatments, the unifying feature of
which seems to me to be the application of water
to the outside of the body. So many things that
are called hydrotherapy involved immersion in water or somehow applying
(11:59):
water to the outside of the body, maybe by massage
or spraying of some kind. The specific term aquatic therapy
seems more often, as best I can tell, to refer
to a type of physical therapy involving exercises you do
while immersed in water. And it seems to me that
hydrotherapy is again a potentially confusing term because it encompasses
(12:23):
so much and includes some practices which seem to me
to be pretty strongly supported by empirical evidence, maybe as
certain types of physical therapy involving exercises done underwater, But
it also includes all kinds of therapies that seem to
me obviously not to be supported by strong evidence, and
then others which are somewhere in between, maybe where the
(12:45):
evidence is somewhat ambiguous. Yeah. In Smith's book, the author
points out that the term hydrotherapy is usually linked to
eighteenth and nineteenth century European health trends, but then these
trends go in and out of fad even into more
modern times. So if you're seeing it used in like
(13:06):
literature for some sort of health or wellness business, they're
probably not using it in the eighteenth or nineteenth century
a sense of it, but they may it still be
maybe part of that fad. There may be some similar
ideas that are tied up in it. Yes. Now there
are also much more specific terms, such as the term
balneotherapy b al in the O balneotherapy, which is specifically
(13:29):
the treatment of disease by bathing or soaking, often in
specific types or sources of water, such as mineral springs. Yeah,
and Smith dates balneology back at at least to the
ancient Greeks. It's something that's like documented by Homer, but
it was likely centuries old by that point, even influenced
by various cultures. Yeah, and then you've got other things
(13:52):
like a thalassotherapy. This is treatment of disease with seawater.
This is something that apparently plenty of the Elder was
a fan of. We'll get to that a little bit
later in this episode, but you know, plenty of the
elder was like, there is nothing better for health than
salt from seawater and sun. Did we We did an
older episode about drinking seawater, didn't weigh and we touched
(14:12):
us some of these these fats basically, don't don't actually
do it. Don't go drink a bunch of seawater because
you heard it casually mentioned, right, thank so. In the series,
even though we will inevitably brush up against related topics,
(14:34):
we're going to try to focus mainly on various bal
neotherapeutic beliefs and legends, beliefs about the healing powers of
soaking or bathing, and especially the belief that there are
specific places with waters that heal when you bathe or
soak in them. And beyond exploring these legends themselves, I'm
interested in the question, are there any cases where there's
(14:57):
empirical evidence that's soaking or bathing can actually have a
healing effect, and if so, how does that work? All right,
let's get into ancient myths and legends a little bit
here to sort of lay some of the crown work.
It's kind of an interesting place to look at in
times where the history sort of breaks down and look
at some sort of general ideas about where some of
(15:20):
these ideas came from and their importance to especially to
ancient peoples. So, just concerning Greek myth, Smith points out
to the gods Apollo and Artemis were closely associated with
sacred cold springs. But then to me anyway, a kind
of unexpected figure emerges as kind of a hot spring
(15:40):
and hydraulics technology. Hero I was not expecting to think
about Hercules or Heracles in this regard. Oh, Heracles is
kind of a hot spring mascot in some cases, yeah,
hot springs, but also just like harnessing the power of water,
So he is a sociated with the invention of hot
(16:01):
springs and Greek tradition this is after he was thrown
into the pool at Thermopoli and regained his strength following
the completion of his labors. Strong association here between virility
and hot springs. Apparently, these hot sulfur springs in particular
were also considered a gateway to the realm of Hades. Now,
as for other myths about Heracles and water, I mean,
(16:25):
I think the one that should come to everyone's mind,
in part because we talked about it in Weird Alt
Cinema if you listen to our Weird Alt Cinema episodes,
is the cleaning of the Gigean stables, the foulest stables
and all the land. This is one of the challenges
that Hercules had to deal with. This was of course,
as one of his labors. And how does he clean
them out? Well, he just redirects a river through them.
(16:47):
That's smart thinking. Yeah, it's interesting because I never really
thought about it too much. I just figured, well, this
is the kind of thing that a very strong but
a very clever hero would do. Right. But yeah, you
think about redirecting rivers and all you're getting into like
the work of canals, and ultimately hydraulic technology. Though, actually,
(17:09):
when you think about it, I mean, if you've ever
observed what happens when floodwaters go through a building, they
do not actually clean it out. They make it quite filthy,
right right. But nowadays, if you're cleaning out stables, you're
probably using redirected water one way or another in the process.
Even if you're not just absolutely hosing everything out, you know,
(17:29):
you're having to use other tools, etc. Now Heracles slash
Hercules also has some other encounters with various river gods
and certainly water entities. But the other big one from
the labors is the slaying of the Hydra, which was
a water monster, and so this connection is not lost
on other scholars that ran across the paper titled Heracles
(17:51):
and Hydraulics by J. V. Loose from two thousand and six,
And this paper points out that both the stables and
the Hydra are essentially hydraulic labors, and the author contends
that there is a connection here between Heracles and late
Heltic water technology and water management. So it's almost like
we could think of him as the kind of the
(18:12):
kind of like an ancient Greek saint of water technology. Wow,
they're seeing Hercules in a whole new ways, the King
of Wet. Yeah. Anyway, going back to Smith, though, you
have you also just have to realize you have various
ancient cultures that prize both naturally occurring hot and cold
springs and or the utilization and development of technologies to
(18:32):
artificially recreate these experiences in the home or in you know,
some homes or adjacent to the home, or in some
sort of communal setting. And you know, I would I
would refer back to some of our invention episodes that
deal with various hydraulic technologies and plumbing and so forth,
and inevitably if you would probably be surprised at just
(18:56):
how far back some examples of these technologies really go.
Smith also shares a couple of great examples in the
book related to divine baths of the ancient worlds. So
these again are not we're not necessarily talking talking about
naturally occurring waters here. We're talking about some sort of
prepared water, or in some cases there's not even something
(19:18):
in the real world. It's just again purely getting into
religion and mythology. But first of all, in ancient Egypt,
ancient Egyptian priests who along with keeping their bodies shaved,
and this had to do with lies apparently, and oiled.
Also bathed in cold water twice each day and twice
each night to help maintain this kind of ideal higher
(19:40):
body that befit one in contact with the divine. If
you're more familiar with Bible traditions, those also include various
kinds of ritual bathing in preparation for say, entrance into
the temple or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, people are
always having baths or getting their feet cleaned by Jesus
that It's just there's a lot of it, and there's
(20:01):
so many examples from so many cultures, you know, because again,
these ideas of hygiene and purity becomes so wound up
with each other. Now, the pharaoh himself didn't have to
go through all this was not taken necessarily two cold
baths a day and two at night, but still certainly
had an extremely high standard of personal grooming and was
purified via some sort of a bathing ritual at birth,
(20:25):
at death, and then in the afterlife as well, according
to their beliefs. So Smith writes that in the afterlife
it was said that he would be bathed, fumigated, shaved
and oiled by the goddess Nut. I believe Smith doesn't
specify the goddess, but I believe it's Nut in this case,
and this would not only clean but revive him. Quote
(20:48):
he received his bones of metal and stretched out his
indestructible limbs. His body came together and was entirely refashioned. WHOA,
So that's that's a heck of a bath, like physically
reassembles your body into some sort of unbreakable form for
the afterlife. And you have plenty of other examples of this,
(21:09):
but just one in passing here. Homer has a whole
bit in the Iliad describing the goddess Hera cleaning herself,
putting on cosmetics. So even the gods in some traditions
have to strive to achieve the finnished body, just like
mortals do. I guess they have a better starting place,
but they still have to do things to reach this
(21:30):
ideal level of godhood. Yeah, And speaking of Homer and
the Iliad, this brings us to the role of bathing,
and especially medicinal bathing in Greek and Roman culture, which,
though by no means the only culture is to employ
these practices, we're lucky to have a lot of sources
(21:51):
on so I wanted to turn to a paper called
Water and Spas in the Classical World, published in the
journal Medical History in nineteen ninety by an author named
Ralph Jackson. I looked him up. Jackson was a scholar
working at the time for the Department of Prehistoric and
Romano British Antiquities at the British Museum, and it might
(22:12):
not come as a surprise to listeners here that one
major source consulted on this matter is Plenty of the
Elder in his Natural History, who in book thirty one writes,
quote everywhere in many lands gush fourth beneficent waters here cold,
they're hot. They're both in some places tepid and lukewarm,
promising relief to the sick. And so Jackson writes that
(22:34):
in the first century CE, the time of Plenty's writing,
the Roman Empire had many spas, which they called aqui,
and there at the time this paper was published, there
was thought to be written evidence of references to roughly
one hundred or so unique spa locations, places usually fed
(22:55):
by natural springs. Many of these, at the time of
writing had not been physically located or excavated by by
modern scholars. At some Roman spa locations, we know where
they are, though it seems the springs have run dry
at other places. There's basically been continuous usage since ancient times,
I believe Smith, and this was a book from two
(23:16):
thousand and seven, so I'm not sure where the where
the account still stands, but Smith writes that some four
hundred major bath sites from the from out the area
outside of Rome had been found, but still more, of
course we're completely unearthed. So going into Jackson's overview of
the Greek and Roman medicinal uses of water, he writes
(23:38):
that if you go farthest back in Greek history to
like the home Eric period, which is literary period from
before the classical Greek period, bathing facilities were mainly associated
at this point with just hygiene and comfort. So if
you're a rich person, an important part of being a
good host is providing bath waters for your guests. But
(23:59):
by the time time of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates,
like the fifth to the fourth century BC, it seems
bathing had come to signify more than just cleanliness and comfort.
Bathing was part of medicine, and so many Greeks of
this period saw bathing, specifically the use of hot and
cold bathwater as a way to regulate the bodily humors.
(24:22):
Now we've gone into a lot more detail on humoral
theory in the past in other episodes, but in very
short order, Humorism is an obsolete medical theory that traced
to health and disease to the balance or proportion of
four fluids also known as humors within the body. Yeah,
(24:43):
black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. This was thought
to explain a range of facts about a person and
interesting note, there are still artifacts of this way of
thinking in our language today. So when you maybe describe
a person's temperament as sanguine or as phlegmatic, you are
(25:03):
referring to flim and blood blood the sanguine fluid these.
This is based on the humor theory of personality. So
under the system, your personality or your current mood could
be explained by humoral equilibrium. Maybe your depression is a
result of too much black bile, etc. But diseases of
(25:25):
the body somatic diseases could also be explained by an
imbalance of these four fluids, and the four humors were
each associated with various states of hot or cold and
wet or dry. So, for example, yellow bile was hot
and dry, blood was hot and wet, black bile was
(25:45):
cold and dry, and flegm was cold and wet. And
according to some ancient Greek physicians like Hippocrates, one way
to help regulate your humorl balance would be to heat
the body, cool the body, moisten it, or dry it. Yeah,
and even today you go to any kind of like
robust spa situation, you have various means at your disposal
(26:07):
to tinker with those settings, right, yeah, yeah, you can
tweak the knobs. Now. While the humoral framework may have
occasionally produced apparent healings or apparently good results, we know
today these probably would have been due to placebo effect
or maybe in some cases just happy accidents. Humoral theory
has no general factual basis. But this did not stop
(26:31):
bathing from becoming and remaining an extremely popular treatment for
disease and ill health for centuries all throughout the classical
Greek and Roman regions. Why would this be well? Jackson
offers an observation that this is not proof of exactly
why it worked this way, But Jackson writes quote, baths
were both pleasant and by the Roman Imperial period at
(26:53):
least comparatively freely available. So they were just pleasant. They're
just nice, They felt good, and you could easily get
to a bath. These are a couple of features shared
by not all, but many popular alternative medical treatments to
this day. You might notice like there may be no
real evidence that this essential oil has a direct mechanism
(27:15):
of action against I don't know what you're arthritis, but
it's relatively cheap to get, it's easy to get, and
it smells nice, which makes you feel good, so you
know that it's not hard to see why it would
be a popular treatment. It also feels I think we've
talked about this before. It also checks off that box
of something is happening, like a really strong smelling oil,
(27:37):
or certainly just a very hot shower very or even
just a very cold shower, etc. Like it. There's a
certain shock to the system that occurs that that you
if you lean into any kind of expectation, well then
there you have it. There is that surely the effect observed. Yeah,
it makes you feel something different or sense something different,
(27:57):
which helps create the feeling that something is happening. In
your body. Yeah. So, the ancient Greeks and Romans had
a number of different beliefs about the medicinal and therapeutic
uses of baths. But just to cite a few examples
(28:18):
featured in this paper, warm water was often believed to
help with the absorption of nutrients from food because it
quote softened the bather's body. I don't know why I
found this image so funny, but I did. I was
trying to think, why would you think of it that way,
softening the body to absorb nutrients better? And I wondered,
(28:39):
maybe this is similar to observing something from food like
that kind of warm concoctions or warm doughs tend to
emulsify and absorb ingredients more easily. I don't know. Yeah, yeah,
just speculating there. Then again, I don't know how cold
their dough in ancient Rome would ever get. I mean,
they didn't have refrigerators. Well, if you're if you're in
(29:00):
water long enough, of course you do get you get
kind of wrinkly, right, Yeah, you could maybe be seen
as a softening of the skin. Yeah. But also hot
water baths were thought to treat symptoms from pneumonia, including
back in chest pain, to treat fatigue, headaches, and trouble
with urination, to encourage urination. But in Roman times, public
(29:22):
baths were also important and complex community facilities. I think
it's very important to understand the like the many different
roles they combined, and how important they were for a
local community. Their function was at once hygienic, social, recreational,
(29:43):
and medicinal. So according to Jackson, for example, you know
you might go to the baths for hygiene and grooming.
So you're going to go there to wash your body.
Of course, you can bathe in the water, but you
can also get your skin scraped. They had these instruments
called strigeles where they'd like kind of it wouldn't be
exactly shaving, but kind of scraping you down with a
blade to get like oil and dirt off your skin,
(30:05):
and then they would, you know, maybe apply a new
perfumed oil to you. You could also get your hair
taken care of. You can get unwanted hair removed. You
might also go to this bath for exercise, so in
a way be kind of like a gym. You also
go there to hang out and socialize with friends. You
could get a massage, or you could treat your diseases
or get advice about diet or health. So it combines
(30:28):
all these different things. It's got elements of a gym,
a barber shop, like a ymca with a pool and
hot tubs. It's got a hospital or a clinic, and
a public bathing facility just all together into one. Yeah,
for many people it becomes just a center of their
social life. I remember we did an Invention episode about
(30:50):
the invention of toilets, and one of the really funny
things was the Roman facilities that had apparently just like
social toilets where people go, you know, sit on a latrine,
but it's just a row of them all in the line,
where people would just hang out, I guess, and chat
while they're pooping. You know. I um, this is I
(31:11):
have nothing to back this up at, but I do
wonder like maybe they had curtains and the curtains didn't survive,
Like what would what would people make of a bathroom
today where the stalls had been removed and they were like,
they might think, we'll look at this. They just had
one toilet next to another. They just walk in and
there are the toilets. Oh maybe I don't know, but
I mean probably probably not, probably not, But there are
also many specific examples of ancient authors prescribing hot or
(31:36):
cold baths for different medical complaints. So one figure talked
about in this paper is named Esclepiadis, who was an
ancient Greek physician who worked in Rome and lived from
like the one twenties BCD about forty BC. And Esclepiadis
advised the use of baths as a treatment for the
(31:57):
sick and preventative medicine for the healthy. And though it
seems prescriptions for hot water baths were generally more common
at the time, a Sclepiadis was known for advising cold water,
which led plenty of the elder to refer to him
with the nickname the cold water Giver. One of his
followers Antonius Musa, so this is a guy who came
(32:19):
up in the school of a. Sclepiadis. Even famously treated
the Emperor Caesar Augustus with cold baths, and this is
chronicled in Suetonius's biography Life of Augustus, in which he writes,
and this is a translation by J. C. Rolfe quote,
in the course of his life he suffered from several
severe and dangerous illnesses, especially after the subjugation of Cantabria,
(32:42):
when he was in such a desperate plight from abscesses
of the liver that he was forced to submit to
an unprecedented and hazardous course of treatment. Since hot fomentations
gave him no relief, he was led by the advice
of his physician Antonius Mussa to try cold ones. So
it's getting cold baths for abscesses of the liver, and
(33:03):
the use of this treatment by the emperor led to
fame and riches for Antonius Musa and led the cold
water treatment to become somewhat fashionable. In fact, this is
another thing I think we can see patterns of today's
you know, like a one celebrity gets some particular type
of surgery or does some kind of health trend or something,
(33:23):
and it becomes fashionable, a bunch of other people want
to pick up on it. And in the case of
cold baths for the liver, some practitioners at the time
even advise patients to bathe in cold water during the
depths of winter. So they took it seriously. Oh we
On the other hand, you had the Roman physician Kelsis.
I think sometimes maybe pronounce celsus celsus, but I think
(33:44):
those romans cs are supposed to be a hard case sounds,
so I'm going to say Kelsis recommended baths is a
treatment for quote skin complaints, diseases of sinews, gout wounds,
digestive disorders, wasting diseases, eye diseases, and fevers, as well
as in convalescence after surgery. And Kelsis here did not
(34:06):
agree with the Sclepiades and Musa on cold baths for
abscesses of the liver. Kelsis recommended hot baths and said
quote all cold things must be especially avoided. So you
get different schools of thought. There's also an ancient school
of medicine at this time known as the Methodists, and
this might be obvious, but no relation at all to
the Christian denomination. They were just called Methodists. They were
(34:30):
named after their supposed adherence to the method. They were
fond of recommending baths and mineral springs, not just for
immersion but also for drinking. And the Methodist idea of
physiology seems a little hard to understand. I wasn't familiar
with it before I was reading and trying to put
it together. Jackson explains it by saying that they classified
(34:51):
diseases into either acute or chronic, so to an extent
we still do that today, but that they saw the
cause of disease as stemming from either excessive constriction or
excessive relaxation, and that baths could be used to treat
these states. So, for example, the Methodist physician named Sournus
(35:13):
of Ephesus, who lived from the first to the second
century CE, thought baths were an important treatment for inducing
relaxation and patients whose diseases were caused by too much constriction,
and he also advised the use of hot baths for
women in later stages of pregnancy. Now, most of what
I've been talking about up to this point has been
(35:33):
focused on ancient Greek and Roman beliefs about the medicinal
or therapeutic uses of hot or cold baths in general,
but there were also beliefs about the special healing properties
of specific waters the sites often called spas, such as
sulfur springs, alum springs, bitumen springs, alkaline and acid springs,
(35:55):
as well as of seawater, which, as I mentioned earlier,
plenty endorsed as being you know, there's nothing more beneficial
for the body than salt. And I think we're going
to come back to more thoughts about these specific water
sources and their associated spas in the next episode or
later in the series. But I couldn't leave it off
here without a taste of a brief reading from Plenty
(36:16):
of the Elder in the Natural History book thirty one,
about people who take it a little too far, who
get a little too excited about the alleged healing powers
of the spa. So are you ready for this, yes,
Plenty rights. Sulfur waters, however, are good for the sinews,
alum waters for paralysis and similar cases of collapse. Waters
(36:37):
containing bitumen and soda, such as those of Cutilia, are
good for drinking and as a purge. Many people make
a matter of boasting the great number of hours they
can endure the heat of these sulfur waters, a very
injurious practice, for one should remain in them a little
longer than in the bath afterwards, rents in cool fresh water,
(36:59):
and not go away without a rubbing of oil. The
common people find these details irksome, and so there is
no greater risk to health than this treatment. Because an
overpowering smell goes to the head, which sweats and is
seized with chill, while the rest of the body is immersed.
Those make a like mistake who boast of the great
(37:19):
quantity they can drink. I have seen some already swollen
with drinking to such an extent that their rings were
covered by skin since they could not avoid the vast
amount of water they had swallowed. So it is not
good to drink these waters without a frequent taste of salt.
It's back on the salt again, said, that's the problem
(37:42):
people go into the spa that they're like, they sit
in the sulfur water too long, it goes to their head.
But then they're also like, I'm gonna drink all this
spa water. I'm gonna drink so much that you won't
be able to see my jewelry anymore. My rings will
disappear between swollen skin and the problem I didn't get
some salt in between. That's the problem. I mean, I
(38:02):
love this because also there is some sound advice here.
I mean, obviously, if you drink too much water that
can hurt you. And also if you stay in some
sort of a hot tub or a sauna or steam
room situation longer than advised. You can also run up
against some ill consequences. So you know, at heart there's
(38:25):
some good advice here and just not necessarily a modern
understanding of exactly what the risks are. No, I totally agree.
Actually plenty is giving sound advice. That is right, my
sound advice. And this is why MCA advice is, don't
get into a conversation with a talkative old fella in
the sauna, because that guy, no matter how nice he is,
(38:46):
he can inevitably sustain enhanced temperatures for far longer than
you can, and it will be harder and harder to
tear yourself away as you become overheated, and while trying
to main polite and nodding your head to their stories.
That is also sage advice, if I may say, Pliny
(39:07):
and caliber. But like I said, we'll come back to
discuss some more specific mineral springs and spas and localized
water traditions in the next episodes. Now, I do want
to come back to Virginia Smith for just a little bit,
because the author has an entire chapter on the Roman
baths and I just wanted to run through some bits
(39:28):
here that may shed some additional light on, So what
we've been talking about. First of all, Smith writes that
the Romans were heavily influenced by the Greek concept of
the managed life, which seems to line up fairly closely
with this idea of the finished body. But in both
cases Greeks and Romans, but especially the Romans, bathing was
also part of politics and state craft. So again, I mean,
(39:52):
part of it comes down to like where are you
hanging out, but also it gets tied up in these
just ideas of culture, and with the Romans, the Roman
bath becomes part of their civilizing process. Yes, I get
the sense that for the Romans, like having a good
local bath facility was part of kind of town pride.
(40:15):
It was a part of like what made you show
that your society was sophisticated and powerful. Yeah. Yeah, So
the Roman elite, they certainly had their baths and like
their bath, but they also somewhat erratically over time, spent
money on healthy services for the people that included public baths,
along with other things like town doctors, sports programs. Kind
(40:36):
of getting getting into that where you're talking about with
the idea of the Roman bath as being this gymnasium
slash limscas you know, and everything else. These programs, Smith rights,
would have only impacted about a quarter of Roman imperial residents,
those living in cities and regular bathers, so those two
things had to line up. But that's still quite a
(40:58):
lot of cleanliness for the time period. And Smith writes
that quote urban Roman life would have been inconceivable and
a lot more feted and visibly filthy without the various
public baths, latrains, fountains and taps served by the Roman aqueducts.
And that, of course is that's a whole issue in
and of itself. Like to power all of this, you
(41:18):
need to be able to control the water. You need
to be able to bring the water where you need
it to be, and the aqueducts were a huge engineering
victory on that front. Also, you need you need a
good sewer system, and when they worked, the Cloaca or
the Roman sewers were also an essential part of the system.
(41:39):
This reminds me of our invention episode on the toilet.
You know, when you're tracing the history of the flushing toilet,
it's one thing to be able to supply it with water,
quite another to have a good drainage or sewage system
to back it up, right, Yeah, I mean I think
you could argue that when it comes to waste disposal technology,
the good drainage or sew or system is the more
(42:01):
important element than the toilet itself. Yeah. So, like, like
we were saying that the baths were an essential part
of Roman life, and Smith points out that that, Yeah,
in fact, if you look at if there's a decline
of the bath system in a given city, that's generally
a sign of greater economic instability or some other kind
of unrest. Like you can use it as sort of
(42:22):
the you know, the litmus test for how how life
is going in that particular corner of the empire or
the empire as a whole. Now, Smith notes that the
main reason for the Roman public baths was quote pleasure
politics and propaganda rather than disease prevention proper. But the
hygienic impact, while likely marginal, that then margin still might
(42:46):
have been enough to tip the scales in public health. Okay,
but this would be talking about its actual effect on
health rather than perceived effect on health, right right, Like, Like,
how for for all of this bathing and talk of
the humors, like, was it actually making any kind of
an impact on the overall health of a population, and
so probably not to a large degree, but the small
(43:09):
degree to which it did have an impact that might
have been enough to say sort of keep a society
like a little more healthy than normal and maybe just
on the right side of you know, pandemic illness, that
sort of thing. And I don't know if we'll get
into this in the next episode or not, but like
another thing to consider with like the global history of
(43:29):
bath cultures is that at times there does become a
disease fear regarding these places, and sometimes there's a moral
panic regarding these places, and we see that played out
with the popularity of say spas and saunas throughout European history. Now,
the Romans were apparently initially resistant to the Greek idea
(43:51):
of the bath gymnasium. I'm not sure exactly why, but
they eventually gave in between twenty nine and nineteen BC.
According to Smith, whoever was in the Roman culture, we're
saying no, we should not have a gem at the bath.
They're finally they're like, okay, that's fine, we can, we
can have a gem at the bath. I found this
really interesting. So again, a lot of these, the Greek
(44:12):
enthusiasm for baths. This gets inherited and and and co
opted by the Romans. But the Romans were likely so
gung ho for all of this in part because of
a pre existing bath culture connected to the various volcanic
hot springs on the Italian peninsula. Yes, okay, so here
you see we see connections, causal connections between culture and geology. Yeah.
(44:34):
And it's also an important reminder that even if we're
talking about sort of like the importance of Greek bath
culture Roman bath culture, and how these different cultures and
spread to different areas, it's still not a situation where
somebody like Hercules is coming along and saying, hey, guys,
I just invented something. Get this, what have you put
your whole body in warm water? Like? And then everybody's
(44:56):
mind is blown. You know. No, it's it's like these
ideas as would have been widespread already. So any place
that suddenly encounters like the Roman idea of baths, it's
not all completely new to them. There might be it
might they might be stressing some things that were different.
There might be some sort of wrapping for it. You know,
these I say, maybe the ideas of the humors or
something to that effect. But just the idea of enjoying
(45:19):
the benefits of a hot spring or a cold spring,
those are likely already inherent in a given culture for
one reason or another. But then there will also be
different preexisting bathing cultures as well, and Smith includes a
nice example of this. So the Etruscans were apparently all
about small half baths, and they didn't dig communal baths,
(45:40):
even for like families. The Romans thought differently though, and
so and even with the Romans, though, you have the
situation where they had to come around to fully accepting
the idea of the Greek gymnasium bath. So even though
everybody might generally be okay with the idea of bathing
in hot water bathe in cold water, they're going to
(46:01):
be different ideas about particular benefits or how you should
go about doing these things culturally. And then again we
get into the geography again, which sites are important, which
sites are important within a given culture, and then which
sites end up being co opted by cultures that the
takeover a given area in vada given area, or just
(46:22):
over the long course of time, become dominant in a
period that once had different ideas. All right, well, I
think we're going to have to call it there for
part one of the series, but we will be back
next time to discuss more about the healing waters. Yeah,
certainly in the meantime, if you have anything you want
to write in about concerning traditions of healing waters or
just experiences with pleasant waters. If you want to talk
(46:46):
about particularly great springs, you've been to that sort of thing,
and we're always interested in that. I don't know how
much we'll be able to get into various cultures in
the episode or episodes ahead on this topic, So yeah,
if there's something near and dear to your heart right in,
we'd love to talk about it on a listener Mail episode.
Those listener Mail episodes, by the way, come out on Mondays,
(47:07):
our core episodes of Stuff to blow your mincament on
Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do a short form
artifact or monster fact, and on Weird House Cinema on Fridays,
we just take a little time to talk about a
weird film. Huge thanks to our audio producer J J. Paseway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other. To suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
(47:28):
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