Is there any health benefit to bathing every day, or is it more of a social convention?
It’s totally a social convention, according to the doctors I spoke with. They said it’s very important to wash below our wrists [i.e., hands], and the worst thing that could happen to you, if you suddenly became a 17th century person and never washed beyond your wrists, would be some skin conditions or fungal things. It’s no doubt comfortable to be clean. But there is no health benefit to washing above the wrists [i.e., the body] other than possibly preventing some fungal things. Did you find that conventions around bathing are driven by technological change or that societal attitudes drive the technology? The latter, very much. The Romans had amazing technology. The great imperial baths were fed by the aqueducts in these enormous tanks called castella. The way they heated the bathhouse with this underfloor heating and heating within the walls was just so impressive. It wasn’t that anybody ever lost the know-how of that technology. It was that, for more than 1,000 years, practically no
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