LTC3 Hygenic Roman Baths

[fredtheobviouspseudonym]

Originally Posted by Bruno

That seems... I mean, it doesn't matter if you don't have a clue about disease theory, but wouldn't the water start to be mostly stewed sweat and assorted gunge, rather than water, after a while? Humans don't LIKE that smell, as a group. So how would they change the water when it started smelling like old socks?

Remember old Rome was a slave culture.

I'd guess that when the water temperature reached that point, for a small bath-basin some burly slave would show up with a bucket and bail the sludge into the city cloaca.

For larger baths: From antiquarian William Smith: "In the cold bath of Pompeii the water ran into the basin through a spout of bronze, and was carried off again through a conduit on the opposite side." http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/...*/Balneae.html. And from , describing various baths: "The fourth, E, was provided with a hot-water bath at its west end. The contiguous walls which p98formed three sides of this alveus were lined with vertical flue-tile communicating with the hypocaust below, the opposite wall of the chamber being also similarly lined. The bottom was of a single flag which rested upon the hypocaust pillars, and its sides were of red stucco, with a drain at the south end." [http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/...5*.html#baths]

So while some units may not have had drains others did.

[Tzeentch]

-- Fellow bathers could have all sorts of diseases and problems, and if the water was not flushed out you probably were sitting in water that had already been used by those with dysentery, worms, diarrhoea, gonorrhoea, etc. Celsus noted that you shouldn't visit the baths with infected wounds, but he's the one that also prescribed the baths for all sorts of ills.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by fredtheobviouspseudonym

Remember old Rome was a slave culture.

I'd guess that when the water temperature reached that point, for a small bath-basin some burly slave would show up with a bucket and bail the sludge into the city cloaca.

Somehow I doubt any business would wait until the water was "sludge", even. Although that's a good point - pure grunt labor, like a medieval bath runs on. Which in turn suggests that just because it doesn't have a drain doesn't mean the water wasn't changed regularly, and some peons didn't get the job of emptying the bath and scrubbing it down to clean up algae, soap skum (for the areas that had soap) and the inevitable oil residue from the whole oil-scraping routine.

I'm just having problems visualizing this as significantly worse than, say, lake water (which can be pretty damn bad for you depending on who else is swimming in the lake) but since lake water is basically the water standard for the time, I'm thinking the horror is a little overstated.

The unspoken implication is that it's more like a neglected swimming pool, stale standing water with algae and human body fluid, and I don't think there's an era where someone wealthy enough to build a roman-style heated bath complex would tolerate that, let alone attract customers with it.

Originally Posted by fredtheobviouspseudonym

So while some units may not have had drains others did.

What with roman engineering being what it was, I'm not surprised to read this. I mean, they figured out how to pipe IN water...

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by nondescript handle

If I remember correctly, one of the tenets of Turkish bathing culture is: "Only moving water cleans."
So it seems that they've avoided this pitfall of their predecessors.

It's a Moslem thing, rather than specifically Turkish.