Would you wash your clothes in stale wee? 12 bizarre hygiene habits from history

From washing clothes in urine to bathing in milk, Hilary Mitchell explores how historical ideas about cleanliness, health and the human body might seem very strange to the modern eye

Green-tinted photo collage featuring a 19th-century woman styling her hair in a corset, alongside a toothbrush and a flowering plant branch.

Published: November 1, 2026 at 12:16 PM

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In this day and age of relatively easy access to indoor showers and running water, we tend to assume that people in the past simply didn’t wash enough, and probably smelled pretty bad as a result. But that idea is a major oversimplification.

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When we look back over the centuries, it becomes clear that bathing and hygiene weren’t just about cleanliness: they often formed part of elaborate attempts to understand how the body worked, how it stayed healthy, and how it became ill.

This in turn led to some very strange theories and beliefs about the benefits – and dangers – of a good scrub down. So from washing with wine to brushing your teeth with bricks, here are 12 of the strangest beliefs in the history of hygiene.

1. Bathing could “open the pores” and let disease in

Pores were a source of a great deal of fascination for early modern physicians. Many believed that bathing in warm water could open up the body’s pores to the extent that, in certain conditions, harmful vapours or corrupted air might enter the body.

William Vaughan, who wrote treatises on medicine in the seventeenth century, was concerned by the possibility that – if pores could let sweat out – they could let other, unhealthy and unwanted substances in. However, this isn’t to say he believed people should avoid bathing entirely, just not “excessively”.

A bath became “excessive” if it disrupted the body's natural balance by opening the pores too much. Vaughan also warned against “the closing or stopping of the pores: which happens by immoderate anointing”.

This might seem contradictory, but he and other physicians thought the safety of bathing depended on a careful balance of conditions. Imagine a window: in general, opening the window is good, but leaving it open during a storm is bad. You just need to get the timing right.

Classic oil painting of an 18th-century noblewoman sitting in a draped bathtub while holding a teacup and saucer.

A woman enjoys a hot chocolate in the bath in this 17th-century painting. William Vaughan advised against “excessive” bathing for fear of letting disease into the body’s pores | Credit: Alamy

2. You should wash your clothes in urine

These days we tend to wash clothes to get rid of unpleasant, smelly substances, but in pre-industrial times, before commercially manufactured soap was widely available, people had to get creative: and sometimes turn to the chamber pot for assistance.

Alongside wood ash, which produces an alkaline solution when soaked in water, households sometimes used stale urine to improve washing performance.

As it aged, the urea in urine broke down into ammonia, creating a mild alkali that helped dissolve fats and loosen dirt from fabric. When used alongside ash-derived lye and a good bit of elbow grease – namely, giving the clothes a good and vigorous dunking in tubs, rivers, or streams – this produced an effective early form of cleaning system.

Consider yourself very fortunate you were born into an age where you have easy access to urine-free washing powder and machines that do the hard work for you.

3. Too much bathing would “weaken the constitution” by removing beneficial oils

The Victorian period was quite conflicted when it came to the topic of bathing and hygiene. The era saw both growing enthusiasm for sea bathing, Turkish baths and hydropathy (‘water cures’), but this was combined with cautious medical warnings that excessive bathing could remove beneficial oils, cause chills and generally weaken health.

One 1860s health text stated: “Once a week is often enough to bathe the whole body for the purpose of luxury or cleanliness.”

The same passage continues: “The oil which is secreted by the sebaceous glands of the skin... serves the purpose of lubricating its surface.” It warns that if “very frequent bathing of the whole body is practised” then this protective, constitution-fortifying substance would be depleted.

However, at the same time, other Victorian health writers were enthusiastically promoting regular bathing. Andrew White Tuer's late-Victorian book Luxurious Bathing argued that the practice could be beneficial and “renovating to enfeebled constitutions”.

Presumably, only if it wasn’t done so frequently that all of those precious bodily oils entirely disappeared.

19th-century oil painting of a woman reclining thoughtfully in a metal bathtub, holding pink roses over the edge near an open book.

The Bath by Alfred Stevens, 1873-74. The Victorian period saw an increase in hydrotherapy, but some medical texts suggested bathing only once a week | Credit: Getty Images

4. Hair washing could cause nervous complaints

Hair was another hot topic when it came to hygiene: many 19th-century hair care manuals warned against washing the hair too frequently, wetting the scalp unnecessarily and exposing the head to cold after washing.

George Thomas Jackson’s A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of the Hair and Scalp (1887) repeatedly cautions the reader against excessive washing, as wet hair was believed to make people susceptible to chills, as well as neuralgia and other nervous disorders.

Instead, regular brushing was often recommended as a safer way to distribute the scalp’s natural oils and keep hair healthy. Beauty manuals often recommended 100 brush strokes morning and night.

Brushing was believed to remove dust and loose skin, carry away excess oil and stimulate circulation.

WATCH | Ruth Goodman explores the hygiene habits of ordinary Tudors

5. Strong scents could prevent or cure disease…

Medieval physicians believed health depended on balancing blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile (the theory of the four humours). They were also deeply concerned with corrupted air and foul, pestilential vapours.

Strong, pleasant scents were often thought to counteract this corruption. As a result, doctors frequently prescribed aromatics and perfumes as medicine, believing that strongly scented herbs, spices and resins possessed specific hot, cold, wet or dry qualities that could positively affect the body’s humoral framework, as well as having the handy side effect of covering up unpleasant smells.

For example, the Italian physician Taddeo Alderotti is associated with the use of aromatic preparations such as cloves, musk and camphor, used to counteract the effects of putrefaction and foul air.

Such remedies were believed to neutralise harmful vapours before they could affect the body, offering protection from disease, which placed quite a lot of responsibility on what was essentially a medieval air freshener.

Medieval manuscript illumination depicting a customer in a blue robe interacting with a shopkeeper behind a counter hung with candles or goods.

An apothecary sells musk to a customer in a scene from a 14th-century medical handbook. Pleasant odours were thought to alleviate any problems caused by “corrupted air” | Credit: Getty Images

6. …and so could hot and cold water

Nineteenth-century hydrotherapists viewed the body less as a collection of separate, unique organs in the modern medical sense, and more as a hydraulic system of moving fluids which could fall out of balance and need re-routing…and they were the plumbers who could achieve that.

They considered the skin to be an active, responsive surface (almost like a living control panel) that helped govern what was going on inside the body. Heat, cold and sweating were all believed to influence circulation and the body’s internal ‘forces’, altering how blood and bodily energies moved around.

By chilling or heating the skin with water, hydrotherapists believed they could redirect circulation, wake up sluggish organs, and generally coax the body back into order.

Illness, in their eyes, wasn’t usually seen as a single faulty organ misbehaving; it was more like the whole system had slipped into the wrong configuration: fluids pooling where they shouldn’t, energies becoming disordered, the delicate balance lost – that sort of thing. ‘Water cures’ offered a way to press reset and get that misbehaving internal pipework back in order.

7. It was a good idea to clean your teeth with powdered brick

In the late 18th and 19th centuries tooth powders were all the rage, but they often contained highly abrasive ingredients such as charcoal, powdered brick and even pumice.

Dentists increasingly – and correctly – argued that these substances polished teeth at the cost of gradually wearing away the protective enamel.

One of the earliest such warnings came from Thomas Berdmore in A Treatise on the Disorders and Deformities of the Teeth and Gums (1768). He criticised the fashionable habit of using highly abrasive powders simply because they made the teeth appear white.

He warned that many preparations “...wear away the enamel”, and once enamel had been lost, he quite rightly pointed out, it couldn’t be replaced.

However, many people loved the shiny white gleam too much to give up their aggressive tooth scrubbing habits. This in turn led to teeth becoming thinner over time, yellowing (because the underlying dentine showed through), and an increased risk of tooth decay.

Vintage newspaper advertisement for Floriline liquid dentifrice, featuring an engraved illustration of a woman holding a toothbrush alongside promotional text.

An 1890s advert promotes tooth powder. This one was made from plant extracts, but others in the period contained much more abrasive ingredients – including powdered brick | Credit: Alamy

8. …or ‘fumigate’ yourself with sulphur and tar

Ancient Romans didn’t just fumigate buildings to eradicate pests, they also practised forms of self-fumigation using sulphur, bitumen, resins and other substances.

Pliny the Elder sang the praises of sulphur as a powerful medicinal and purifying substance, used for cleansing wounds and treating skin diseases.

Similarly, Pedanius Dioscorides describes the use of resins, bitumen, sulphur and aromatic woods as substances for inhalation. These ‘smoke baths’ were believed to draw out disease, dry harmful bodily fluids and purify affected areas.

In practice, they may have produced short-term relief from some ailments but this came at the cost of exposure to smoke and potentially harmful combustion byproducts, including toxic gases such as carbon monoxide – which you don’t have to worry about if you’re bathing with soap instead of burning tar.

9. Washing children too often – or for too long – was dangerous

Victorian childcare manuals generally encouraged cleanliness but warned that infants were especially vulnerable to cold, and prolonged bathing and excessive handling could be dangerous as well as overstimulating.

Popular authorities such as Pye Henry Chavasse advised that washing should be performed quickly because “the body will become chilled, and harm instead of good will be the result”. The concern was not cleanliness itself but the belief that excessive bathing, prolonged immersion or exposure after washing could weaken a child’s delicate constitution. As Chavasse put it: “Let there be no dawdling in the washing; let it be quickly over.”

Mrs Beeton also warned that the lengthy process of washing and dressing could become “an operation of positive irritation and annoyance”, which anyone who has ever bathed a griping, wriggling baby knows to be very true.

Historical black-and-white photograph of a woman in a long Victorian-style dress kneeling on the floor to bathe a smiling baby in a small wooden tub.

A baby enjoys a bath at home. Pye Henry Chavasse recommended that bathing a child should be done quickly, so it didn’t weaken their constitution | Credit: Library of Congress

10. Foot-washing could cure a cough

In many 18th- and early 19th-century households, when the throat started tingling and a cough began to take hold, the first port of call was a basin of hot water – for the feet, rather than the head.

In many medicine manuals, foot bathing was recommended as a way to ‘check a cold’ before it had time to develop.

A popular medical assumption at the time was that early colds involved a disturbance of circulation and suppressed perspiration, and that restoring warmth to the extremities could help re-establish balance.

In his 1769 book Domestic Medicine, William Buchan advises that “a cough is generally removed… by keeping the extremities warm, drinking warm liquors, and bathing the feet and legs frequently in lukewarm water”.

The foot-washing didn’t work as a cure for infection, but at least it probably felt quite pleasant, and wasn’t actively harmful – unlike some of the other ‘cures’ on this list.

11. Washing with wine could eliminate particularly foul-smelling sweat…

In medieval medical writing, unpleasant sweat wasn’t simply considered a cosmetic issue, but a sign of bodily imbalance or ‘corruption’ needing correction.

The 12th-century physician Trota of Salerno noted with concern that some of her patients produced sweat that “stinks beyond measure”. Her recommended treatment was to cleanse the skin with a cloth dipped in wine infused with bilberry leaves or berries.

Together they were thought to correct the underlying imbalance responsible for the odour, restoring the skin to a healthier state.

The wine may have helped a bit, as it has mild antiseptic and antimicrobial properties, but if the unpleasant odour stemmed from an underlying medical condition, such as a skin infection, metabolic disorder or poor health, the wine and bilberry wipe would have done very little to address the root cause.

Medieval manuscript illustration depicting a man in a wooden bathtub outdoors being attended to by four figures under a tree.

A medieval illuminated manuscript depicts a noble taking a bath. Famous female physician Trota of Salerno recommended using wine to deter bad-smelling sweat | Credit: Alamy

12. …and bathing in milk was thought to ‘rebuild’ the skin and body

Roman writer Pliny the Elder stated that Poppea Sabina – second wife of emperor Nero – bathed in milk, often specifically donkey’s milk, to preserve her skin.

20th century legends emerged claiming Cleopatra did the same. We don’t have any solid, contemporary evidence that she did this; it was probably a way to emphasise Cleopatra’s extreme wealth and access to exotic resources – after all, it takes a lot of lactating donkeys to fill an entire bath.

But the use of milk in bathing and cosmetic washing does appear in antiquity, is echoed in medieval medical recipe traditions, and re-emerges in early modern and 18th- and 19th-century beauty culture.

Milk baths, in particular, were associated with softness, healing and rejuvenation. In classical and later European medical traditions, milk was considered a nourishing, ‘moistening’ substance that could restore depleted or damaged tissues when applied externally.

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This, unfortunately, isn’t supported by any scientific evidence in a medical sense – drinking the milk would probably have had a far more beneficial effect without making you smell like old yoghurt.

Authors

Hilary Mitchell

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