No Sweat

Let's be honest: Our ancestors smelled bad. Even though ancient Greece and Rome were famous for their bathhouses, only the upper crust partook of these pleasures, leaving the average citizen, well, crusty. The poet Ovid once complained that many of his fellow Roman men smelled as though they were carrying goats under their arms. And things went from bad to worse, olfactorily speaking, as the classical world gave way to the Dark Ages, which might more accurately be dubbed the Odiferous Ages.

Even for our more-recent ancestors, bathing was an oddity, engaged in — if at all — more for quack therapeutic purposes than for cleanliness. Elizabeth Drinker, the wife of a prominent Philadelphia Quaker, had a showering apparatus installed in her backyard in 1799, and said of the experience, "I bore it better than expected, not having been wet all over at once for 28 years past." Well into the 19th century, some viewed bathing not as therapy but as a health hazard: In 1835 Philadelphia, the Common Council missed by only two votes passing a ban on wintertime bathing; in 1845, Boston banned bathing except when prescribed by a doctor