A Short History of Bathing

To the best of anyone's knowledge, the human practice of bathing began with primitive man, and is presumed to have developed from the experience of getting wet. As a habit it is more recent than eating, drinking, hugging or kissing, and probably evolved only after a long period of scratching. It preceded the use of soap by thousands of years, and has figured prominently in the histories of sex, religion, medicine and Madison Avenue.

Since time immemorial people have bathed in the sacred waters of the Nile and the Ganges. According to Herodotus, the priests of ancient Egypt bathed religiously "twice every day, and twice every night." Bathsheba was taking a bath when she first attracted the adulterous attentions of King David, who saw her from the roof of his house and found her "very beautiful to look upon." Leviticus demands that the man and woman who "shall lie with seed of copulation ... shall both bathe themselves in water"; and when the beauteous Esther sought to win the favor of King Ahasuerus, she was bathed and scented for a whole year.

The gods and goddesses of ancient Greece, too, took baths as a prelude to seduction. When Hera saw Zeus seated upon Mount Ida, she began to scheme how to "entice him to lie by her side in love ... so she went to her chamber ... she closed the doors, and first she washed every speck and stain from her lovely body with a bath of ambrosia. She anointed her body with oil—ambrosial, soft, scented with perfumes ..."

It is somewhat surprising that the ox-eyed goddess took her bath in private and without help. The mortal Odysseus, for his part, was constantly having his back scrubbed by obliging females. When he set sail from Calypso's isle, the fair-haired nymph saw him off only after she had bathed him and clothed him in garments scented with juniper. The sportive maidens who attended Nausicaä could hardly be restrained from helping him bathe alfresco in a river, and at the palace of Alcinoüs, "the women bathed him and rubbed him with oil."

But such merry arrangements were makeshift compared with the organized sweating and splashing that took place in the classical Greek gymnasium. Here the naked Hellenes wrestled and romped in glistening coats of olive oil, which were later sweated away in steam rooms. From thence they nipped into a cold bath, donned fresh linen, and spent the afternoon at philosophic discourses in an adjoining lecture hall.

It was on this high-minded model that the Romans built their first public baths, which soon expanded into palaces of pleasure where the accent was on hot water, steam and scented sensuality. Philosophy was washed down the magnificently engineered drains, and the discourses of the bath were seldom Platonic. Although the boys were ostensibly separated from the girls, slaves of the opposite sex were commonly employed as bath attendants, and Montaigne reports that it was the custom for ladies "to receive men in the vapor baths" for steamy assignations.

"Who was ever worse than Nero? What could be better than Nero's baths?" the poet Martial asked, for it was the fat-necked emperor who gave Rome its first taste of bathing on the grand scale, when he constructed a handsome bath on the Palatine Hill in the hope of diverting public attention from his parricide, pyromania and assorted pranks. In the opulent baths of his own Golden House, both sea water and sulphur water were on tap and dinner guests were sprayed with fragrances from concealed sprinklers. Poppaea, Nero's sometime wife, preferred to bathe in asses' milk, and recommended bathing in a solution of benzoin followed by a dusting with powdered starch to a young lady who wished to "pass as a virgin."

Harking back to the virtuous simplicity of the old days, when Romans "bathed their whole bodies on market days only"—and then in plain stone tubs—Seneca asked, "Who at this time would submit to bathe thus?" The dour orator scorned the grandeur of the baths, with their precious marble and silver pipes. "Since dainty baths have been invented, we are become more nasty," he grumbled. "Horace, when describing a man infamous for his dissipation, what does he reproach him with? With smelling of perfumed balls—Pastillos Rufillus olet!"

With this allusion to early cakes of scented soap, Seneca shortly departed this life. Ordered by Nero to kill himself, he botched his suicide, and, ironically, expired in the suffocating heat of the furnace room of his own private bath. Following the death of Nero, the pitch of luxury mounted, as each succeeding emperor sought to ensure his popularity by providing bigger and more sumptuous baths. The Baths of Caracalla were a mile in circumference and contained theaters, temples and festival halls. (The massive main building served as a model for the construction of New York's Pennsylvania Station.) Diocletian's Baths, completed in 302 A.D., were still more magnificent, and could accommodate thirty-two hundred bathers in the heated pools.

But the decline of Rome was already under way, and with the collapse of the Western Empire, the unsupervised baths became sinkholes of crime and depravity. Christians, who had labored in slave battalions to build the baths, denounced them as pagan works. Cleanliness now being held akin to devilishness, the buildings were abandoned, and the odor of sanctity became indistinguishable from b.o.

The reaction of the Eastern Christians in Constantinople was more moderate, and the practice of bathing was preserved largely through the influence of the Greeks, whose forefathers had introduced the classical steam-and-water treatment into Africa and Asia. The slow spread of the art among Arabic nations is typified by the story of Abooseer, an itinerant bath-keeper, as related in The Thousand and One Nights: "So when Abooseer knew that there was not a Bath in the city ... he repaired to the council of the King, and went in to him, and having kissed the ground before him and prayed for him, said to him, 'I am a man of a strange country, and my trade is that of a Bath-keeper, and I entered thy city, and desired to repair to the Bath, but saw not in it even one Bath; and how is it that a city of this beautiful description is without a Bath, which is one of the best delights of the world?' So the King said to him, 'What is the Bath?' "

Starting, so to speak, from scratch, Abooseer described its wonders, and the King ordered such a building to be constructed. When it was finished, "Abooseer invited the King to the Bath. So he mounted, with the great men of his empire, and they went thither. He pulled off his clothes and entered the inner department; and Abooseer entered and rubbed the King with the bag, removing from his person the impure particles like twists of thread, and showing them to him, whereat the King rejoiced.... After Abooseer had washed his skin, he mixed for him some rose water with the water of the tank; and the King descended into the tank and came forth, and his skin was softened, and he experienced a liveliness which in his life he had never known before. Then Abooseer seated him upon the raised floor, and the Mamelukes proceeded to perform on him the operation of gently rubbing and pressing him, while the perfuming vessels diffused the odor of aloewood. And the King said, 'O master! Is this the Bath?' Abooseer answered 'Yes.' And the King said to him, 'By my head, my city hath not become a city, save by this Bath!' "

It was the enthusiasm of just such satisfied customers that led to the construction of hundreds of baths throughout the Near East at a time when their popularity was on the wane in Europe. However, some Roman baths, built in northern outposts for the military, continued to operate for the benefit of local civilians, and mixed bathing parties enabled Germanic friends and neighbors to see each other socially throughout the Middle Ages. According to the Encyclopedia of Sexual Knowledge, "Everybody undressed at home and went to the baths practically naked.... The men went into the baths wearing a suspensory; on their entering, an attendant handed them a bundle of rods, intended for massage; the women's (continued on page 128)Bathing(continued from page 110) bathing costume consisted of a diminutive apron which usually slipped off the hips." The bathers had to be administered to by the opposite sex. It goes without saying that the robust waiters and trim waitresses in no way detracted from the erotic atmosphere. So that public baths, as contemporary writers testify, soon turned into brothels or houses of assignation. There is no doubt that it was not so much the water which attracted clients as the prospect of an affair. As a poet amusingly put it:

Nothing better than a bath for the woman sterile,

For with the water goes company virile.

Pictorial art of the period offers ample evidence that the feudal bath was a centuries-long bash. Aprons and suspensories were apparently discarded in favor of hats, and gentlemen are to be seen in all their neck-up propriety assisting their dames in the offices of the bath with much amorous feeling.

The greatest impetus to social bathing in England and France occurred during the Crusades, when knights, squires and camp-following wenches became acquainted with the rose-scented delights of the Islamic bath. Indeed, the present-day Order of the Bath is supposed to have originated with the traditional top-to-toe tubbing that knights received at the hands of young virgins. Parsifal, Tristram, Guy of Warwick and other chivalrous chaps all enjoyed such maidenly ministrations. A contemporary illustration depicts one lucky lord being showered with rose petals by his fair attendants.

Prior to the Crusades, the English attitude toward water was one of extreme caution. Although the stuff was acknowledged to be useful for putting out fires, few chose to drink it unless it had been "cleansed and pourged by boylynge," for it was believed to be "infect with frogges and other wormes that brede." Pure springs and "holy welles" were used mainly for medicinal purposes, and were under the protection of monks and friars, while the average Englishman drank ale and scrupulously avoided dampness.

Wine, Women, Baths by art or Nature warm,

Used or abused do men much good or harm.

Such was the prudent message contained in a lively Latin tract on hygiene which William the Conqueror's son, Robert, received from the learned doctors of Salerno in 1096. But once the fad for bathing took hold, the immoderate and simultaneous pursuit of all three warm pleasures soon earned the public baths a reputation for being seminaria venenata, or seminaries of sex and sensuality. It was many a young wife's tale that she had become pregnant merely from bathing in water previously used by a man, and the superstition arose that male bath water was dangerously potent with "frogges and other wormes" of fertility. Sir Thomas Browne found such stories "common in every mouth" in the Twelfth Century, and sought to scotch them by declaring that it was impossible to thus "fornicate at a distance, and much offendeth the rules of Physick."

As in Germany and France, the English baths, or "stews," became resorts for lower-class lust. The name "stewhouse" served to designate both public bath and brothel, just as the Italians used bagnio for either bathhouse or bordello. Respectable people were more exclusive in their bathing habits, but illicit passions thrived on limited privacy, and tubbing as a twosome was a popular get-acquainted gambit with upper-class couples. If found flagrante delicto, the sudsy lovers could presumably plead that they were only trying to save water—no small consideration at a time when it had to be purchased by the bucketful from professional water-bearers or hauled by hand from a town pump—which, by the way, appears in early records as a pompe, pymp, pimp or plump.

At the end of the Fifteenth Century, the intimate association between high jinks and H2O began to dissolve. With repeated ravages of plagues and two major outbreaks of sweating sickness, public baths were closed, as breeding places of infection, and the habit of personal cleanliness was all but forgotten. As a German student of modes and manners described the situation, "Ladies and gentlemen of the Sixteenth Century arrayed themselves in the most costly fabrics; they were stiff with velvets, silks and gold brocades; they were positively plastered with pearls and precious stones; and—they stank like the plague!"

Throughout the century pestilence continued to sweep Europe, but few suspected that the cause might be found in lack of civic sanitation. Streets were narrow and filthy. The habit of emptying chamber pots out of upper-story windows into the gutter made a city stroll so hazardous that gentlemen gallantly took the side nearest the curb when walking with their ladies—a position they have assumed ever since, without quite knowing why.

Students who wonder at the fuss made over Sir Walter Raleigh's throwing his cloak across a puddle for Good Queen Bess, need only acquaint themselves with the pollution of Elizabethan puddles to realize the magnificence of the gesture. But of all the heroes, wits and courtiers who surrounded the Virgin Queen, only one man responded to the situation with anything approaching genius. His name was Sir John Harington, and he invented the single most important piece of plumbing in the modern bathroom: the flush toilet.

To include this now familiar facility as part of the bath is a peculiarly American innovation, historically resisted by most of the world's peoples. Even today, travelers in Europe will often find the toilet or "w.c." enshrined in its own little closet, quite apart from the tub. Sometimes it is even outside the house—a location fraught with inconvenience and redolent of historical and religious tradition.

The ancient Hindus, for example, were enjoined to retire to the distance of a bowshot from the house with a brass vessel. Members of the Hebraic Essene sect were provided with small paddles with which to dig suitable holes in out-of-the-way places. The Egyptians, too, were a privy people, and the rhymed advice of Hesiod offers an insight into the outdoor habits of the Greeks:

Stand not upright before the eye of day;

And scatter not your water as you go,

Nor let it, when you're naked, from you flow:

In either case, 'tis an unseemly sight:

The gods observe alike by day and night:

The man whom we devout and wise may call

Sits in that act, or streams against a wall.

When bathing was at its height in Rome, luxurious latrines with marble seats were built directly over the sewers that sluiced down from the hills, and tubs were placed at street corners to serve as urinals. Trimalchio, the rich man's rich man, whom Petronius profiled in the Satyricon, was attended by a eunuch who followed him about with a silver chamber pot. While "playing at ball with a company of boys," the decadent tycoon "snapp'd his fingers, at which sign the eunuch held the chamber pot to him as he was playing; then calling for water, he dipped the tips of his fingers in it, and dry'd them on the boy's head."

In the absence of fleet-footed eunuchs and short boys with bushy hair, the feudal lord repaired to a rude wooden privy along with his vassals. Affluent barons had indoor facilities tucked away in castle closets with narrow window slits which some Victorian romancers believed to be crossbow vents. Others mistook the tiny closets for cloakrooms or chapels intended for princely meditation. The fitting consisted of a wooden seat placed over an open shaft, which ran down the outside wall and emptied into the moat. If the Nuremberg Chronicle is to be believed, it was through one such shaft that a certain proud nobleman was attacked unawares by enemy archers. The castle was instantly surrendered.

The public privies, or "jakes," of medieval cities were plain wooden plank affairs built over deep pits, and risky rest rooms they were. At times the board seats would rot out and citizens would fall through. Since rolls of tissue were unheard of, each crude comfort station was supplied with a curved stick for the use of all and sundry. In darkness it was often impossible to decide which end of the tool to grab, and unlucky guessers were heard to complain of getting "the moocky end of the stick." Indoors, finer folk used chamber pots placed under special seats in a closet, known as "close stools."

In the year 1596 Sir John Harington, the Father of the Flush Toilet, wrote The Metamorphosis of Ajax (or "a jakes"), which contained complete details for the construction of a simple water closet and cesspool. The aptly named Sir John was a man before his time. Though his godmother, the queen, had a working model built in Richmond Palace, where a copy of instructions hung hopefully from a peg, the ingenious device was widely ridiculed.

This, then, was sanitation's darkest hour, despite the fact that thinking men were beginning to advocate at least a modicum of bodily cleanliness. "I look upon bathing as generally salubrious," Montaigne confessed, "and believe that we suffer in health to no small degree for having left off the custom." And advanced practitioners prescribed hot mineral baths for a variety of human ills, including "Preternatural Thirst, All Sorts of Worms" and "the Longing of Maids to eat Chalk, Coals and the Like."

In France, where physicians believed that male glands were prone to become congested with stones and sediment, Montaigne found some experts who claimed, "It is a good thing to have frequent intercourse with women, for that opens the passages and carries away the gravel and sand," while others declared it "very bad, because it inflames, wearies and weakens the kidneys." Similarly: "It is a good thing to take hot baths, since that relaxes the places where the sand and stone settle: it is also a bad thing, because the application of external heat assists the kidneys in baking, hardening and petrifying the matter there stored up."

While French kings and courtesans possessed baths of considerable splendor, bathing was extremely occasional, and wariness of water continued into the Eighteenth Century, when the arts of powdering and perfuming reached their apogee. The Marquise de Pompadour spent an estimated million pounds a year on fragrances, and it was rumored that Du Barry secreted scented pads about her person in order to seduce Louis XV. Most people were content with their natural aroma, however. When an outspoken ladyfriend told Samuel Johnson that he "smelled," the gamy doctor's only concern was over her misuse of verbs. "You smell," he said, "I stink."

In the first half of the Eighteenth Century, the pro-water wing of the medical profession began to propagandize in earnest. Upper-class faddists made it fashionable to wash the hands, face and neck every day, and persons of means resorted to Tunbridge Wells, Epsom and Bath to take "the cure."

Of all English watering places, Bath was certainly the richest in tradition. Founded by King Lear's father, Bladud, who allegedly had been cured of leprosy by bathing with his pigs in the hot, bubbling mud of the springs, the town had been a favorite resort of the Roman legions, who built a beautifully functional bath for themselves which they called "Waters of the Sun." Out of the ruins left by the onslaughts of Pict, Scot, Saxon and Dane, a monastery and church had arisen around the mineral springs, which early Christians believed were fed by the tears of fallen angels. By the Seventeenth Century, the waters had been invested with the old fertility myth. The childless Queen Catherine visited Bath in the hope of soaking up enough fecundity to present Charles II with at least one legitimate offspring to counterbalance the merry monarch's ever-increasing brood of bastards. Although Catherine's mission failed, the publicity of the royal visit attracted a sampling of aristocracy, social climbers, gamblers and gay ladies that made Bath the birthplace of British café society.

For a peep into the mystique of the era's bathing, we are indebted, naturally, to Samuel Pepys, who visited Bath in June of 1667: "Up at four o'clock, being by appointment called up to the Cross Bath, where we were carried one after another.... And by and by, though we designed to have done before company come, much company come; very fine ladies; and the manner pretty enough, only methinks it cannot be clean to go so many bodies together in the same water."

The chummy social atmosphere Pepys describes suggests a trend away from the purely medicinal bathing of the previous century, when the Cross Bath was reportedly "much frequented of People diseased with Lepre, Pokkes, Scabbes and great Aches." Indeed, the author of A Step to the Bath was moved to declare in 1700, "Here is perform'd all the wanton Dalliances imaginable; celebrated Beauties, Panting Breasts, and Curious Shapes, almost Expos'd to Publick View." And another observer concurred: "The Baths were like so many Bear Gardens, and Modesty was entirely shut out of them. People of both Sexes bathing Day and Night naked; and Dogs, Cats, and even human creatures were hurl'd over the rails, while People were bathing in it."

Although the municipality passed an ordinance against "smoaking Tobacco in bathing Cisterns, singing songs and such disturbances," it had no regulations regarding gambling, and rakes of all ranks and stations wagered freely at cards, dice, cockfights and bowling. Usually, our Step to the Bath informant reports, "the Citizens won the Courtiers' money, and the Courtiers swore to be Reveng'd upon their Wives and Daughters."

The literature of Bath abounds in evidence that such revenge was easy for courtier and citizen alike. In The Bath Unmask'd, a popular period play, Pander boasts to Sprightly: "As for Ladies—we have all Degrees, as their several Interests draw 'em hither. Those of the first Rank ... who Understand the Use of Nature better than to be confin'd to conjugal Constancy, improve their talents by private Intercourse; Coquettes enlarge their Conquests; Prudes indulge in a Corner, and are demure in Publick.... Profess'd Ladies of Pleasure find Cullies in Abundance ..."

With the election of the elegant Beau Nash as Master of Ceremonies and King of Bath, the town began to assume a veneer of fashionable respectability. Order was restored to the "bathing Cisterns," rules of dress and etiquette established, gambling put on a house-controlled basis—and Bath became the English resort of the Eighteenth Century.

Celia Feinnes, a diarist contemporary with Pepys, has left us a description of the period's bathing costumes: "The Ladyes goes into the bath with garments made of fine yellow canvas, which is stiff and made large with great sleeves like a parson's gown; the water fills it up so that it's borne off that your shape is not seen.... The gentlemen have drawers and waistcoats of the same sort of canvas, this is the best linning, for the bath water will change any other sort yellow."

Bath reigned supreme until 1789, when the royal court began to sojourn at seaside Weymouth, where, "when George III bathed, a band was towed out to the royal machine to play God Save the King when his head reappeared after the first dip."

Whether at Weymouth or Bath, when the season ended, peers, fortune hunters and mistresses returned to town for a winter of powdered wigs and perfunctory washing. In the better English homes, mirrored washstands were not unknown, and private companies supplied wealthy Londoners with piped-in water for three hours a day. A curved and shallow bathtub made its appearance in France, concealed in a chaise longue. But, as Siegfried Giedion observed after a study of French engravings: "Cleanliness of the body could hardly have been its purpose. It forms the background for a scene between a gallant, a young woman, and a procuress. Bath and sin were one."

In 1710, a scene between one such gallant and the modish Mme. de Prie occasioned the first public mention of a new bath-type convenience—the bidet. Seated upon a handsomely wrought boudoir model, it was Madame's pleasure to receive a call from the Marquis d'Argenson, who expressed surprised delight at the sight of the droll little bowl. Advertised by one delicate merchant as "a porcelain violin case," this aid to feminine daintiness has since become a standard fixture in Continental bathrooms, although guardians of Anglo-American plumbing have always considered it too frankly French.

The custom of receiving guests while seated upon a chaise d'affaires did not originate with Mme. de Prie, however. Louis XIV regularly gave audience to ambassadors and other favored dignitaries while seated upon the royal close stool, and was thus enthroned when he announced his engagement to Mme. de Maintenon. This was known as "French courtesy," not to be confused with the Scottish courtesy of shouting "Gardy loo!" ("Gardez l'eau!" or "Look out for the water!") before emptying a chamber pot out of an Edinburgh window.

During most of the Eighteenth Century the call of nature continued to be answered by chamber pots, which were sometimes concealed in sets of dummy books bearing such titles as Mystères de Paris and Voyage to the Low Countries. Under their carriage seats, my English lord and lady kept traveling versions of the same ceramic necessity—some of them survivals of the Commonwealth, with Cromwell's portrait painted on the bottom.

Since Queen Anne's day, Windsor Castle had boasted "a seat of Easement of Marble, with sluices of water," and inventors had been at work on improving it. The first patented w.c. appeared in 1775. Designed by a Bond Street watchmaker, this fully automatic model found a fair degree of acceptance, and was soon being installed in London town houses—usually under the stairs or in some windowless closet.

Nevertheless, when Queen Victoria took the throne, Windsor Castle was still plagued with fifty-three overflowing cesspools. There were no baths at all in Buckingham Palace at the time of her coronation, and those of her subjects who thought such matters important made do with portable hip baths that had to be filled by hand. Reformers raised their voices against this deplorable lag in basic hygiene. "We must have a standard of cleanliness as well as of truth," David Urquhart pleaded. "We must look for one tested by long experience and fixed from ancient days—this standard is The Bath."

British travelers, in particular, were becoming more and more beguiled by the pleasures of the Islamic bath; and their accounts glowed with enthusiasm: "It was ecstatic enjoyment, it was Elysium, nothing seemed wanting to perfect bliss." Lady Mary Wortley Montagu attended a bridal reception at "one of the finest baths in Constantinople," where the young bridesmaids "appeared without other ornament or covering than their own long hair braided with pearl or ribbon....'Tis not easy to represent to you the beauty of the sight," she concluded, "most of them being well proportioned and white skinned; all of them perfectly smooth and polished by frequent use of bathing."

In Russia, another traveler reported, "they find the use of the bath acts as a powerful remedy in carrying off the superabundant humours. Scores of individuals mingle together in a heated apartment, and after being sweated, switched, and half-boiled, rush into the open air like so many frantic satyrs and plunge into the coldest water."

The Abbé Chappe d'Auteroche, who visited Tobolsk to witness an eclipse of Venus, also managed to take a long look at their exotic public baths. "These are shared by men and women alike," he noted. "Planks partition the sexes, but since both sexes leave the bath naked, they see one another in this condition and stand conversing upon the most indifferent matters. In the poorer villages the sexes use the baths promiscuously."

The Finnish bath, or sauna, was almost identical with that of the Russians, and turn-of-the-century tourists found the friendly natives willing "to leave the Bath, and assist in yoking or unyoking, or fetching provender for horses, or in anything else, without any sort of covering whatever, while the passengers sit shivering with cold, though wrapped up in a good sound wolf's skin."

The genuine bath, as its most fervent advocates saw it, was nothing less than the complete Islamic treatment, with its emphasis on cleansing the pores from within by means of perspiration, as well as from without by means of soap and water. It was David Urquhart who named it the "Turkish Bath," and it was he who led the fight for the building of two large baths in London—fitted, of course, with private cubicles where Victorians could sweat in seemly solitude.

While the English were admiring their Turkish delights, the Irish were pointing with pride to their own ancient "sweating houses"—beehive structures of stone, similar to outdoor ovens, in which Erin's kings and countrymen had been steaming themselves since the days of Finn Mac Cool. Indeed, in Germany the Turkish Bath was known as the Irish Bath. When the first baths were opened in America, they were advertised variously as Turkish, Russian and Greek—though they might just as well have been called Indian, since sweat huts had been used by all native tribes as a cure for fevers and colds.

With the flourishing of egalitarian and hygienic ideals during the Nineteenth Century, it began to trouble socially conscious people that a proper steam bath could be enjoyed only by those who could afford a visit to a specially constructed building. To answer the need for more available facilities, in the 1830s, European hygienists began promoting the shower. The novelty of a mild needle spray was so great, however, that after three decades a French practitioner found it "no rare thing to see a subject who at his first shower betrays actual terror, shouts, struggles, runs away, experiences frightening suffocation and palpitation."

But human beings are adaptable, and by the end of the century Dr. Oscar Lasser could proclaim, "Die Douche als Volksbad"—"The Rain Bath is the People's Bath." Portable models were introduced into English homes by army officers who had served in the tropics. Visiting Americans found the overhead sprinkler to their liking and brought it back home, where it has since rivaled the tub as the number-one cleanser of a busy, no-nonsense nation.

In a recent interview, as a matter of fact, Mr. Axel Dessau, head of the Danish National Travel Office in New York, somberly announced, "The bathtub is headed for extinction." In Mr. Dessau's opinion, the shower is rapidly and insidiously replacing the tub throughout most of the civilized world. "An international agreement is needed to protect the rights of bathers," he proclaimed.

Mr. Dessau might find comfort by looking eastward. In Japan, for example, it is still possible to get a hot bath in many restaurants as a prelude to dinner. For centuries the Japanese have cherished hot baths in their neck-high tubs as a means of achieving the relaxation necessary to an appreciation of the good things of life.

The East may have been wiser than it ever knew. Reporting on world-wide experiments to discover methods of birth control that will eliminate the need for contraceptives, Dr. Warren C. Nelson of the Rockefeller Institute cited studies in Japan in which modified sitz baths, similar to the old hip baths, in water about 120 degrees Fahrenheit "had been found effective in reducing the number of sperm below levels of fertility for up to twelve weeks." If this news from Nippon proves correct, it could be the Bath of the Future, and a very hip bath, indeed.

Unfortunately for students of the history of the American bath, many source works repeat a group of bogus facts perpetrated by the late H. L. Mencken. In one of his more elephantine moods of intellectual superiority, Mencken concocted his own brief history of the American bathtub. He alleged that the tub was unknown in the New World until around 1840, at which time it was invented in Cincinnati. He described how the inventor, in the absence of running water in the town, employed workers to haul it up from the Ohio river in buckets. He told how a tub was put into the White House in the Fifties, and how Millard Fillmore took the first Presidential bath. And he concluded his history by reporting that U.S. medical men unanimously opposed the new invention as dangerous to health, and that laws against it were passed in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Mencken's fantasy was reprinted in textbooks and encyclopedias, thus making the entire record suspect.

There are claims that stationary tubs were first installed in a group of Philadelphia row houses in 1832, but it is safe to say that the modern combination of tub, toilet and basin was not to be found in many American homes before the 1890s. The saga of the American bathroom, then, is scarcely seventy years old. With the passing of early prestige-symbol types, with their mahogany-enclosed tubs, gold and silver faucets, and sculptured toilet bowls, our pageant of private plumbing moved steadily in the direction of the functional. The bathroom was stripped for the speedy performance of a few essential operations. The tub was recessed into the tiled floor, the toilet tank was lowered from the ceiling, the faucets plated with nontarnishing chrome, and the shower installed in its own cell. The door can now be locked against intruders, the toilet is designed for single occupancy, and the tub and shower are sleek one-passenger jobs in which we can soak or scrub in the innocent belief that the sole object of the bath is to get clean.

In this long-lingering, post-Victorian period, privacy is still the keynote, and there are no signs of a return to musicians, Mamelukes or "trim waitresses" to scrub one's back. But, in recent years, a small, yet significant, drift back to clubby elegance has become apparent in custom-built accommodations featuring twin tubs, washbasins and toilets. Wall-to-wall carpeting, gold-plated faucets, steam-bath stalls, scented shower heads and pink porcelain bidets all figure in luxury-class lavatory designs, together with marble telephones, built-in sunlamps and roomy, rectangular tubs in which any number can play. If high fashion is any guide, the future holds more sociable bathing for us all.

A pictorial view of tubs from other times and places