The first wealth is health

This 2020, the year of Rat coming slowly to the end, the rat the smallest of the 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac, its intelligence, agility, and quick-thinking enabled it to win the contest and become the first year in the system’s 12-year cycle. However the rat also represents the shadow psyche, it was believed at the beginning of this 2020 Chinese year, that social veneers could be stripped off in 2020, allowing people to better know their true selves and those of others. I’ve to start to believe in horoscope too 😉 This year was more gloom than boom year. Now, we are expecting the upcoming New Year and new opportunities. Yes, new better days the world is round and place which may seem like the end may also be the only beginning 🙂  

At this year also our conscious attention often turns to what we don’t have rather what we do. With the advent of the first official days of Christmas shopping, our shopping is closed. We fell overwhelmed by a season of lack. See before we head to the shops, it would do our souls good, it’s probably good to have now a reality check. We cant buy the gifts that count most: good health. Yes, today’s health is a blessing. We can purchase the best medical treatment available in the world, but good health is not for sale. health is a priceless gift from the Spirit that most of us take for granted until we become sick.   

On my work computer screen, each day is the image with the message clean your hands. I am working with heritage and working with art with clean hands is essential, many years ago my mentor said that if your hands are dirty, you still have to learn how to touch the art.

 Now also scientists are able to tell you more about your hands, probably they will be able to say who you are and what you do. Please take a short tour with me through bathing and hands cleaning art today. Art and artists always share stories. Artists illustrated our life, and also washing hands and bathing become part of their inspiration.

Raise the hand for hygiene!

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 You probably already have enough of these messages, and authors wrote at different times about cleaning hands and it’s hard to write something new, do not repeat the same facts again but I find myself it’s a pleasure and privilege to write, and I wish I knew all those stories before I become a conservator.

Also, I’m jealous 🙂 it wasn’t me to say Eureka! Eureka! I’ve no found this.  I had not been stepped into a bath and run naked through the streets of Syracuse such the Archimedes. My life was much easier, I just learn about the water level rose in an easy way in school. Almost everyone during study art conservation was able to meet Vitruvius. He is the oldest authority for the naked-Archimedes eureka story. He was a Roman writer, who included the tale in his introduction to his ninth book of architecture sometime in the first century B.C. Some people read some leave unread, some just pretend that know 🙂 and some scholars have doubted the accuracy of this tale.

Archimedes’ insight led to the solution of a problem posed by Hiero of Syracuse, on how to assess the purity of an irregular golden votive crown; he had given his goldsmith the pure gold to be used, and correctly suspected he had been cheated by the goldsmith removing gold and adding the same weight of silver. Equipment for weighing objects with a fair amount of precision already existed, and now that Archimedes could also measure volume, their ratio would give the object’s density, an important indicator of purity (as gold is near twice as dense as silver and therefore has significantly greater weight for the same volume). Eureka!” has another historic connection to gold. This time it happened during more modern times in the United States. During the California gold rush, prospectors looking for gold in the Californian hills were said to yell “Eureka! I found it!” when they struck gold. To this day, this expression Eureka becomes also the state motto of California, referring to the momentous discovery of gold near Sutter’s Mill in 1848. The California State Seal has included the word eureka since its original design by Robert S. Garnett in 1850.

Most likely, Archimedes never said “Eureka!” And who knows if he really ran through the streets naked. What we do know is that Archimedes discovered the law of buoyancy, or what engineers still call today, the Archimedes principle. Science is all about facts and discoveries, with some of the remarkable breakthroughs coming from seemingly everyday occurrences and experiences. however to these days, saying “Eureka!” as a way of expressing an amazing discovery is out of style. So that’s why I am jealous 🙂 it wasn’t me to say Eureka! Bathing and hands washing are about hygiene. Maybe the most important word in 2020.

This world Hygiene as most of our medical worlds comes from Greek worlds. Hygeia was the Greek goddess of health, who was the daughter of Aesculapius, the god of medicine. She was the goddess/personification of health, cleanliness, and hygiene. Hygieia and her four sisters each performed a facet of Apollo’s art: Hygieia (health, cleanliness, and sanitation); Panacea was universal remedy; Laso was recuperation from an illness; Aceso was responsible for the healing process; and Aglaïa took responsibility for beauty, splendor, glory, magnificence, and adornment. Hygieia was associated with the prevention of sickness and the continuation of good health. We know that cleaning without soap is not cleaning, some of the earliest signs of soap or soap-like products were found in clay cylinders during the excavation of ancient Babylon in 2800 BC. Inscriptions on the side of the cylinders say that fats were boiled with ashes but did not refer to the purpose of ‘soap’. Not only ancient Greeks and Romans took a keen interest in hygiene. The cleanliness in the history of art is often related to religious purification. Moses gave the Israelites detailed laws governing personal cleanliness. Biblical accounts suggest that the Israelites knew that mixing ashes and oil produced a kind of hair gel.

If you want to read more about the history of baths in Greece probably The Book of the Bath, Françoise de Bonneville will be the best. Here you will be able to find more about ancient Rome the first public baths called Thermae which was built by Agrippa (Emperor Augustus’ right-hand man) in the year 19 BC.

In Rome were at least 170 bats operating by the year 33 BC, with more than 800 operating at the height of their popularity in the world. Public baths had been popular since the 13th century. Due to the scarcity of firewood, bathing became an expensive practice.  Whole families and friends had to share a bath, or many of them would remain dirty. Before the Middle Ages, public baths were common, as the general public regularly took time to bathe one way or another. In the 4th and 5th centuries, Christian authorities allowed people to bathe for cleanliness and health, but they condemned bathhouses for pleasure; they also condemned women going to bathhouses that had “mixed” facilities. As time went on, Christians were prohibited from bathing naked, and the Church started frowning on “excessive” indulgence in bathing, as they believed it led to immorality, promiscuous sex, and disease. It was a common belief at the time that water would carry disease into the pores of your skin, and that since the pores opened after a warm bath, this would make you even more susceptible to disease – including airborne diseases. It was also the time that handwashing was not only a sign of good manners but an opportunity to display desirable possessions including basins, ewers, aquamanilia, and jugs. Medieval wills and treasury accounts often list them when they were made of fine materials. For example, the last will and testament of Jeanne d’Évreux, queen of France and wife to Charles IV, lists a basin for hand washing alongside other precious table decorations.

This led to (mostly) lower-class citizens, particularly men, forgoing bathing whenever possible. They did wash their hands and faces and rinsed their mouths, but even this was considered dangerous as it was thought that it caused an excessive discharge or buildup of mucus in the nose or throat and weakened eyesight. The upper class, instead of forgoing bathing altogether, tended to cut down the full-body baths to a few times a year, probably trying to strike a balance of stench vs. bathing. Can you imagine a situation that most of the entire populace smelling rancid wasn’t enough, during Medieval times in Europe, the streets of cities were coated in feces and urine thanks to people tossing the contents of their chamber pots into the streets. One 16th century nobleman noted, “the streets resembled a fetid stream of turbid water.” He also noted that he had to keep a scented handkerchief held under his nose in order to keep himself from vomiting when walking the streets. If that wasn’t enough, butchers slaughtered animals in the streets and would leave the unusable bits and blood right on the ground. You can only imagine how people survived the stench on sun-baked summer days.

Most of the historian knows the story King James VI of Scotland, story tells that he wore the same clothes for months on end, even sleeping in them on occasion. The son of Mary Queen of Scots, King James would supposedly wear the same clothes for months at a time, he also kept the same hat on 24 hours a day until it fell apart! He didn’t take a bath as he thought it was bad for his health! And yet as gross as this all sounds, it was pretty acceptable during the time he lived, in which bathing oneself was believed to cause poor health. He never washed. Sir Anthony Weldon (a man who knew the King) once wrote that ‘his tongue was too large for his mouth and his drink came out of each side of his mouth and dribbled back into his cup’. Manners: He swore all of the time, picked his nose, and used his sleeve as a handkerchief when he had a cold.

Also one of the Kings of France; the Sun of King and his personal hygiene is a matter of debate among historians. On the one extreme is the rumor that Louis took only three baths in his life. It is quite clear how the rumor started: People in 17th-century Europe were told that bathing opened the body’s pores to disease. Bathing was considered to be a terrible health hazard. Instead, people doused themselves with perfume to mask the inevitable stench. They also observed the ring of dirt around the cuffs and collars of their linen shirts and concluded that the flax in the linen had the magnetic ability to draw out dirt and perspiration from the body. Therefore, changing one’s linen shirt often was the path to cleanliness in lieu of a bath. Louis was not immune to these bizarre notions. The modern nose would have turned away from his smell. Louis also had bad breath, which prompted his mistress, Francoise-Athenais de Rochechouart de Mortemart, marquise de Montespan, to lace herself with a prodigious amount of perfume to overwhelm the king’s halitosis. But that triggered Louis’s headaches. They had a flaming row in the royal coach about how bad they smelled to each other. However, some historians believe that the king bathed only three times in his life is rather implausible. Some historians highlighted that Louis did take care to keep himself clean, just not in the way we moderns go about it. Due to his perfume-induced migraines, he was rubbed instead with spirits or alcohol to disinfect his skin. The king changed his underwear three times a day. He even had an entire apartment in Versailles turned into bathrooms, with two private baths for himself. Though Louis was understandably reluctant to bathe, and then only upon his doctor’s orders, these baths must surely have been used more than three times. The Sun King wasn’t the filthy royal he was made out to be. Source: Listverse

In Elizabethan England, it was believed bathing made you ill. Queen Elizabeth, has been historically recorded by many historians as having black teeth with breath that stank, Her body was covered in perfumed talcum powder the whole time to disguise her body odour. It is well documented and a simple Google search will show this. The black teeth are presumed to be a result of her love of sugar and sweets which she was introduced to her during her reign. Her anti-social body odour is something people could not have criticised at the time because she had people beheaded on the slightest whim and change of mood. Shakespeare wrote not of Elizabeth I despite living in the same period (16th Century) because it would be suicide. “Elizabeth I got a law made in England prohibiting the circulation of unflattering portraits of her. Elizabeth’s portraits are notoriously fictitious in always showing her as a pearly-skinned icon of Renaissance beauty even when she was
old.” Despite the stereotype, people did clean and bathe themselves during the middle ages and renaissance age. In fact, peasants often bathed much more than nobility due to free public bathhouses and nobility always changing clothes, unlike peasants. Since the arrival of the Industrial Revolution (c.1750-1850) and the discovery of the germ theory of disease in the second half of the nineteenth century, hygiene and sanitation have been at the forefront of the struggle against illness and disease. However the water was stored in large lead tanks and often became stagnant, it wasn’t much better than the water supply the peasants used. In the decades after the Industrial Revolution cities choked with dirt. Charles Dickens, the great chronicler of the hardships of early modern life, wrote in “Oliver Twist” of a slum in Bermondsey, in south London, that consisted of “rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter”. It contained, he continued, “every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage”

From Georgian’, ‘Victorian times the fashionable ladies carried of the mixed flowers and herbs bougets- Nosegay ( also called tussie-mussie or posey) in the hands, it would also be held under their noses for walking through the crowds to avoid the unpleased smell. The Fashionable Magazine of September 1786 wrote an ‘Essay on Nosegays‘ that I thought might be of interest too.

Today cleaning hands remains as vital as ever, probably is even more important than usual.

Power is in your hands!

Spread Holiday cheer thorough your entire home decorations no matter what holiday you celabrate.

😉

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, or to whatever else you’re celebrating this year!

All the best for 2021

All shall be well, and all shall be well

And all manner of things shall be well

Ella