by Ian Mortimer
Not all ailments can be blamed on the humours or divine judgement; people know that what they eat and drink can also affect their health. Indeed, you may find that they ‘know’ it with even more certainty than you do. Aristotle suggested that six ‘non-naturals’ govern day-to-day well-being: diet, evacuations, exercise, air, sleep and the passions; these lead people to conclude that, if they are unwell, it is probably because they have neglected to care properly for themselves. On top of these six non-naturals, you can add a seventh – exposure to cold – as a reason why people believe they become unwell. Pepys associates his pain in urinating in November 1662 with his ‘having taken cold this morning in staying too long barelegged to pare my corns’. In September 1665, while staying away from home, he has particular reason to rue exposing himself to cold:
And so I to bed, and in the night was mightily troubled with a looseness (I suppose from some fresh damp linen that I put on this night); and feeling for a chamber pot, there was none … so I was forced in this strange house to rise and shit in the chimney twice.2
There are good reasons why, if you are staying in someone else’s house, they will offer to send the maid up with a bed pan to warm your bed before you get in it.
Taking the Waters
The awareness that what goes into the body affects its health does not apply just to those things you eat and drink; it also includes anything that enters the body accidentally through skin pores and orifices. But if dangerous substances can enter the body in this way, then so can beneficial ones. Therefore bathing in mineral-rich water can be good for your health. Moreover, if the idea is to get a dose of the minerals into you as quickly as possible, why bother bathing in the water? Just drink it. For these reasons, the spa towns become hugely popular at this time. Most members of the great, the rich and the middle sort go to ‘take the waters’ at least once a year. Even the less well off embrace the trend: the sailor Edward Barlow bathes in ‘a brave well which is counted very good to bathe in against many diseases’ at Buxton in Cheshire.3 One place no one goes to bathe, however, is the sea. If you go to the beach you’ll have all the sand to yourself, even on the hottest day of the year. The idea that sea water might be imbued with some of the properties of spa water is one for the next century.
The principal spa town in Britain is, of course, Bath, where the hot sulphurous springs have risen for centuries. These are directed into three principal baths (the King’s Bath, the Hot Bath and the Cross Bath) and two subsidiary ones (the Queen’s Bath and the Leper’s Bath). The largest of these, the King’s Bath, consists of a big rectangular pool with a canopied cross in the middle. This cross has stone seats in porticoes all around it, where you can sit up to your neck in the hot water. According to Edward Jorden, author of A discourse of Naturall Bathes and Mineral Waters, the benefits of doing so are that the hot waters
warm the whole habit of the body, attenuate humours, open the pores, procure sweat, move urine, cleanse the matrix, provoke women’s evacuations, dry up unnatural humours, strengthen parts weakened, comfort the nerves and all nervous parts, cleanse the skin and suck out all salt humours from thence, open obstructions if they be not too much impacted, ease pains of the joints, and nerves and muscles, mollify and discuss hard tumours, etc.4
These properties are good for treating ‘palsies, contractions, rheums, cold tumours, effects of the skin, aches, etcetera …’ Jorden even claims that the waters can help with ‘stupidity’.5
The best time to bathe is in the morning, an hour or two after the sun is up. Ladies enter the water in voluminous stiff yellow canvas bathing gowns; these billow out when filled by the water, concealing their figures and thereby preserving their modesty. Gentlemen wear drawers and waistcoats of the same sort of yellow canvas. Poorer men and women have to go into the baths in their own linen shifts (women) or shirts and drawers (men), which cling to the body.6 Jorden recommends that you should also cover your head to protect it from cold airs. He further suggests that you should spend as long in the water as you can stand, at least an hour or two, and to do this every day for as long as you can afford – ideally twenty or thirty consecutive days. If you have a particular ailment and your physician so advises, you should tell one of the attendants and he will arrange for hot water to be pumped directly over the affected area. Schellinks, who visits Bath in 1662, notes that some men and women have more than a thousand blasts of hot water delivered on to their heads and backs. There are attendants waiting in the water with knives to cut off your corns, warts and nails, for a small fee. It is a good thing that the baths are drained after each morning session and allowed to refill for the next day.7
The bathing ritual is very different at another popular spa, Harrogate in Yorkshire. For a start, there are no baths in the town itself, only wells. These produce two sorts of mineral water: ‘sulphurous’ and ‘chalybeate’ (that is, rich in iron). When Celia Fiennes visits, she reports that the chalybeate well is ‘the sweet spa’. As for the other:
the sulphur or stinking spa [is] not improperly termed for the smell being so very strong and offensive that I could not force my horse near the well. There are two wells together with basins in them that the spring rises up in, which is furred with a white scum which rises out of the water: if you keep it in a cup but a few hours, it will have such a white scum over it … The taste and smell is much like sulphur, although it has an additional offensiveness like carrion or a jakes [earth toilet].8
This is what you are supposed to drink. The water imparts its mineral qualities and at the same time opens your bowels to remove all impurities from your body. In Celia’s case, ‘I drank a quart [two pints] a morning for two days and hold them to be a good sort of purge if you can hold your breath so as to drink them down.’
After you have emptied your bowels in this fashion, you should make your way over the hills to St Mungo’s Well, seven miles away. There you may immerse yourself in the mineral spring. But unlike Bath, you won’t be spending a couple of hours sitting in a warm soup: the water is freezing. This suits our Celia, who declares, ‘I always choose to be just where the springs rise [because] that is much the coldest.’9 By her day Thomas Sydenham’s advocacy of cold-water bathing and taking fresh air, especially for those suffering from a fever, has started to become popular.
Ralph Thoresby regularly goes to Harrogate. Normally his first morning draught after arrival upsets his constitution so much that he can do very little the following day. In 1680 this means he has to miss church – hence taking the waters upsets his conscience as well as his bowels. Thereafter, however, he delights in spending days drinking the sulphurous water, walking for exercise in the company of new friends and riding with them to St Mungo’s Well, shivering alongside them in the chill water, and finally dining with them after the day’s ordeals are over.10 But not everyone is so enamoured of taking the waters. Thomas Baskerville states that
At your first coming hither you shall meet with a troublesome delight, an importunity among the women here almost as eager as that of the watermen of London, who shall be your servant to fill water to you when you go to the wells, or bring it to your lodging when you do not. And this clamour we were fain to endure because we were not resolved to drink the water, this evening and next morning – for they got into our chambers before we got out of our beds – with pots of water one cries out ‘I am pretty Betty, let me serve you.’ Another cries ‘Kate and Coz Dol, do let we tend you,’ but to tell you the truth, they fell short of that, for their faces did shine like bacon rind, and for beauty may vie with an old Bath guide’s ass, the sulphur water had so fouled their pristine complexions.11
Your physicians and friends will no doubt suggest that you try various other spas. Tunbridge Wells is popular with the wealthy: coaches come down from London, and there are coffee houses and trinket shops around the walk that leads to the spring.12 If you can’t actually get there in person, you can have the water bottled and sealed with a cork and despatched to you wherever you are in the kingdom.
Epsom waters are similarly conveyed in corked stoneware jars. But wherever you drink them, these waters will have much the same effect. In 1662 Schellinks observes men and women in Epsom taking different routes away from the well after they have drunk several pints and putting down ‘sentinels in the shrubs’, as he delicately puts it.13
If you think that the theory of the humours is a little odd, the fashion of paying a small fortune to ‘take the waters’, freeze yourself in a cold spring, swim in other people’s cut toenails, warts and corns and violently empty your bowels in public every morning will surely strike you as utterly bizarre.
Hygiene
You might have gathered by now that your ideas about personal cleanliness do not exactly accord with those of the seventeenth century. This is not because people don’t care about hygiene. Pepys takes the matter very seriously. When he visits Bath in June 1668 he cannot help but think, as we do, that so many unhealthy bodies entering the same water are more likely to spread their diseases further than cure them.14 The difference between seventeenth-century cleanliness and our own is broadly one of necessity. In the modern world, we don’t all wash our hands before every meal, let alone afterwards. This slackness would strike a seventeenth-century man as disgusting: washing your hands is that much more important when you eat with your fingers. As for bathing in the same water as other people, it is not that they don’t care about the risks of infection but that the medicinal properties of the water outweigh the risks. You can see the same thinking applied in folk remedies. In Orkney and Shetland, if you get a bleeding nose you block it with pig dung. You use cow dung on a bruise, human urine for jaundice, and sheep droppings boiled in milk for smallpox.15 People don’t normally stick pig dung up their nose or sweeten their milk with sheep’s excrement but the circumstances of the ailments require them to suspend normal behaviour. This general point explains many of the supposedly dirty aspects of life in the past: it is not a matter of negligence, but one of priorities.
Ideas about what constitutes normal ‘cleanliness’ are constantly changing. Most ordinary people will wash their hands, wrists, faces and neck – the parts that show – with cold water every morning. They rarely have a bath for the sake of cleanliness: the risks of infection from the impure water are too great. Instead, when necessary, they rub themselves and their hair vigorously with linen ‘rubbers’ or towels. This exfoliates the skin and removes any extraneous dirt. Wearing clean linen shifts, shirts and drawers then soaks up any sweat on the body: these garments can easily be washed, so that effectively the body is kept clean by linen, which in turn is cleaned in soap and water. Washing the whole body, bit by bit, in a basin of water is another way of cleaning oneself. For safety’s sake, the water is boiled and then allowed to cool.
Apart from one visit to Bath, Pepys does not immerse himself in water for the whole ten-year period of his diary. In this he is not unusual. However, some people do take baths. One reason is medical treatment. Your physician may recommend that you bathe by yourself in hot water infused with certain unguents or herbs in order to cure a malady. Or he may advocate regular cold baths. As early as 1693, fashionable people are following Thomas Sydenham’s advice that cold baths are good for your health.16 This view is given powerful support in 1697 when Sir John Floyer publishes his seminal work An Enquiry into the Right Use and Abuse of Hot, Cold and Temperate Baths in England, in which he encourages cold-water bathing on the basis that it stops up the pores and invigorates the bather. Another reason for the growing popularity of bathing is that the practice is recommended by a few wealthy practitioners: Sir John St Barbe has a bathing house at Broadlands, in Hampshire, and Thomas Povey, a London merchant, has a bathroom at the top of his town house.17
The rise in bathing for the sake of cleanliness is mainly due to the influence of the Middle East. British diplomats who travel to Morocco or Turkey note that Muslims bathe regularly and expect others to keep themselves fastidiously clean. They return to Britain with their notions of purity altered, if not turned upside down. British slaves who have escaped or been liberated from their North African bondage similarly come back telling people about Muslim washing habits. Joseph Pitts’s description is particularly interesting:
They have a great many hammams or wash-houses to bathe themselves in, which they go into almost naked … they leave their clothes in an outer room, put on a pair of clogs or pattens, and so walk with their guides into the hot places where, after they have been a little while, they grow into a great sweat, and having continued in it for some time, they have their armpits shaved by their guide, and then retire into a private room where they have their pudenda also shaved, accounting it very beastly to have it otherwise; after which they lie down on the smooth pavement and one of the guides or tenders, being ready with a glove made of coarse stuff or camlet, without fingers, and stuffed with something for that purpose, rubs their body all over, and cleanses it from filth. This they are very dexterous at, for as they are rubbing most parts of the body they will bring the rolls of filth like a worm (it may be two inches in length) under the glove upon the person’s arm that he may see what need he stood in of cleansing … Having washed all over and at last with soap, the guide for a while leaves every person to himself to throw water on his body, and this they may have from two cocks, one hot, the other cold, which run into an earthen pan or else a great basin of marble so that they may make the water of whatever temper of heat, or cold, they please.18
‘Turkish baths’ like this now exist in London. Elizabeth Pepys goes to one in 1660, on the eve of her visiting the queen.19 She probably doesn’t get the full shave down below – Samuel would surely mention it if she does – but otherwise it seems the Middle East is teaching Londoners how to be properly clean. Her very attendance at a hot bath on the eve of an auspicious occasion tells you that people have a positive attitude towards cleanliness, even if it does not affect their everyday behaviour.
Another development mentioned by Pitts is that now people are using soap to clean their hands and bodies. Most liquid soaps, which are used to clean clothes, are smelly and irritate the skin, but now cakes of Castile soap are cheap enough (3d per pound) that you might use it simply to wash your hands. Edward Jorden notes that washing your hands in the Cross Bath at Bath will make your ‘finger ends shrink and shrivel as if [you] had washed in soap water’.20 If you would prefer not to be bothered by body lice (as even a fastidious gentleman like Pepys is, from time to time), then you will make sure that you have a regular change of clean clothes and wash your hands and body with soap every day. Then your only physical irritants will be the fleas in the beds in the inns in which you stay. And toothache.21
Diseases and Their Remedies
The landscape of illness is an extraordinary terrain, some parts of it as fast-shifting as a chalk cliff being eroded by spring tides, other parts as constant as the peaks of a mountain range. It is difficult to know at any given time which diseases fall into which category. Seventeenth-century people have even less idea than you. For example, they have no way of knowing that the plague of 1665–6 will be the last major outbreak in Britain; they remain in fear of it for decades. Moreover, some illnesses they suffer from are simply unknown to modern medicine. You will find it even harder to determine which ailments affect us but not them. In short, all diseases are like stories, in that they come amongst us, linger for an indefinite period, are passed between cultures, change in their telling over decades, centuries or millennia, and then disappear. And after they have been forgotten, there is nothing left to say how they started, continued and ended.
One of the clearest illustrations of the differences you can expect to encounter is a comparison of the major causes of death. In the modern world, the eight biggest killers in Britain are heart disease, lung cancer, emphysema/bronchitis, stroke, dementia, pneumonia/ influenza, bowel cancer and either prostate cancer (for men) or breast cancer (for women). Compare these to the biggest killers of adults, as reported in the London Bills of Mortality.
Although some of these terms probably fold into their modern equivalents – someone dying of old age in the seventeenth century would perhaps be diagnosed with heart disease or dementia in the twenty-first century – there is hardly any common ground between the two. No one suffers from smallpox in the modern world, and very few from tuberculosis in modern Britain. Measles and oedema are not major killers. ‘Convulsions’ are fits predominantly suffered by children, which are rare occurrences in the twenty-first century. On the other hand, cancer is not a worry for most Restoration people: they are more concerned with their teeth. What? Deadly toothache? We all know that to visit the past is to run the risk of dental caries and fearsome surgical instruments but the pain of primitive dentistry is as far as our imagination goes. We never think of there being a significant risk of death from dental problems. But there you go – the landscape of illness is, indeed, constantly changing.
PLAGUE
Plague is an intermittent disease, hence it does not appear in the above list of major causes of death. In the five years of 1660–64, just sixty-one people die of it, out of 85,096 people buried in the London area (0.07 per cent). On this basis it hardly warrants a mention. Even if all the Bills of Mortality for the period 1660–1700 are taken into account, plague only ranks as the fifth-biggest killer.22 However, in terms of perception, it ranks as the most feared disease by a long way. In 1665, 68,596 people in the London area are reported to have died from plague. But that figure is an under-recording: people bribe the searchers to say they don’t have the plague – that their loved one has died of spotted fever or an ague instead – so that their house won’t be boarded up with them inside. The average annual number of deaths in London from all causes in the five years before the plague of 1665 is 17,019; therefore the actual number dying of the plague that year is more likely to be around 80,000 – one-fifth of the population of the city.