Body Odors and American History: A Brief History of the Bathtub

While many Francophiles and European historians romanticize the past, the reality was

considerably less perfumed. For centuries, Western medical authorities warned that bathing could be hazardous to one’s health, insisting that full immersion in water might open the pores to disease, moral weakness, and most detrimentally, French influence. Regularly washing one’s entire body was viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility. In an era when etiquette manuals specified the proper moment to extract lice from powdered wigs (ideally not during supper), submerging oneself voluntarily in water seemed extreme.

In When Society First Took a Bath, Harold Eberlein recounts an 18th-century episode in which an Englishman staying at a French hotel made the reckless decision to request a bath. After several minutes of sustained French judgment, a housekeeper appeared and presented him with a wine barrel—large enough for water, small enough for reflection. The barrel was placed near the fire and filled, ladle by ladle, until the Englishman achieved something resembling hygiene. He reportedly felt much better afterward and faintly oaked.

In America, bathing fared no better. It was considered a luxury, an inconvenience, or something one might attempt accidentally. Even Benjamin Franklin, early adopter of both electricity and soap, treated bathing as a multitasking opportunity, reading while submerged in his home-installed tub. The bills for his bath thermometers survive at Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society, which suggests that while Americans debated “liberty,” someone was playing with rubber duckies. 

By the mid-18th century, public bathhouses attempted to rebrand cleanliness as entertainment. If disease prevention would not persuade the public, perhaps tea, coffee, and “the best of liquors of all kinds” might. Bathing was marketed less as hygiene and more as a social experiment involving steam and mild peril. Many participants were unaccustomed to the ritual. In 1771, Elizabeth Drinker recorded in her diary that she “went this afternoon into the bath” and “found the shock much greater than I expected.” It is unclear whether this refers to temperature, modesty, or the sudden realization that she left the stove on.

Eventually, bathing stopped being an act of courage and became an expectation. The wine barrel gave way to porcelain, the ladle to indoor plumbing, and the shock to lavender-scented bubbles promising transcendence. What was once feared as medically reckless is now marketed as spiritually necessary. We soak to detox, to reset, to glow, to become the kind of people who own matching towels. The 18th century worried that water might weaken the body; the 21st century worries that we did not add enough pink Himalayan salt. The tub has survived it all — superstition, science, capitalism, divorce. And somewhere, in the steam, that Englishman in his barrel nods approvingly, faintly oaked, knowing he was simply ahead of the wellness curve.