What Your History Books Didn't Tell You About Lice

Just like how the myths around corsets survive because it's shocking, the same can be said for how folks (mis)understand the beliefs & practices around basic body hygiene since the medieval period. So, just to cover our bases:

Yes, people washed their bodies before 1920.
No, not everyone had lice.
Yes, people cared about looking clean and smelling nice.
No, people didn't want to sleep or live in filth.

Now, let's dig into the meat of it all.

Sources:

Yones, D.A., Bakir, H.Y. & Bayoumi, S.A.L. Chemical composition and efficacy of some selected plant oils against Pediculus humanus capitis in vitro. Parasitol Res 115, 3209–3218 (2016).

*Keep watching:*

Chapters:
00:00 - 02:01 - Things that annoy me
02:02 - 08:33 - Part 1: Linen Fresh
08:34 - 13:50 - Part 2: Hygiene & Social Class
13:51 - 22:36 - Part 3: Lice, Lice, Baby
22:27 - 30:58 - Part 4: 1700s Hair Hygiene

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📪 Abby Cox
642 N. Madison Street
Bloomington, IN 47404

[oomflem]

Going a bit further back, but nothing drives me more insane as a historian than the myth that medieval people just emptied chamber pots onto each other's heads. DO YOU KNOW HOW EXPENSIVE CLOTHING USED TO BE? A basic set of clothes could be as expensive as a fancy car in modern terms and represent more than a year's labor. And laundry took days. Do you really think people were ok with their neighbours dumping shit all over their most expensive possessions/the majority of their personal wealth?

[dumdumlikespie]

Normally I'd distrust someone who tells me essential oils are a cure to anything, especially in place of prescribed medicine, but when the problem is bugs and these oils are coming from plants that have spent millions of years evolving ways to not be eaten by bugs, that actually makes sense.

[gadgetgirl]

"A slattern is a woman who doesn't keep things in their places"

(Glances around my apartment with growing unease)

[Turquerina]

I understand that while this video primarily focuses on European and American hygiene as it relates to lice and other ailments, I want to remind everyone that various people have different ways of dealing with hygiene. For instance, many Sub-Saharan Africans don protective hairstyles or wrapped their hair in clean cloth while Asians in the East would've worn their hair up too and use rice water, which is really good for hair care.

No matter where you are in the world, people have always cared about staying clean and washing themselves frequently. Especially the closer you are to the equator, the more you cleaned yourself (which is still true today). Lice is everyone's enemies!

[legslegsankles]

I wish we as a society wore linen undergarments under our bras. Bras are so expensive and hard to clean and it would make so much more sense to not let all of our chest and underarm sweat seep into it and instead have a layer between.

[AurelUrban]

Busting historical myths that demean people from the past is one of my fabourite genre lf content

[jessicahart]

One thing that I think we forget to think about with the whole "oh people didn't bathe bc they thought it would make them more sick" thing is just how many WATERBORNE illnesses there are. Some are even resistant to our modern water treatments (see Milwaukee Cryptosporidium outbreak of '93) so... Yeah... I dont blame people for not wanting to go to bathhouses bc we still havent worked that shit out for public pools. 😬😅

[Mrs_Homemaker]

Re: lice and lard. A common "grandma remedy" for lice is to slather all the hair and scalp in mayonnaise and wrap in plastic wrap and let it sit for a couple hours. Because it smothers the lice and loosens the nits! Then just wash and nit pick. Lard would totally have the same effect.

[alejandramoreno]

Essential oils are the plant's defenses against insects, that's why they work. Turpentine comes from conifers, and the most potent poison comes from a plant, the same plant castor oil comes from. This is to say, "natural" doesn't mean harmless.

[RabidChild]

It took me two years to completely get rid of bed bugs. I got them from an order from eBay. I think I have some sort of minor PTSD from the experience.

[RychaardRyder]

I change my sheets weekly and my parents have always viewed me as incredibly strange as they change theirs every month or so, hell nah I'm sweaty, AND 18th century people prove me right apparently! clean bed linens gang unite!

[catherinezenovich]

Is anyone else's head itching every time Abby says lice! When my son had persistent head lice 20 years ago, nothing seemed to work. I talked to the public health nurse and she said to get some cheap conditioner and then smother his head and comb it with a lice comb. I did this every few days for about 10 days and it worked brilliantly. Yes, I was like a chimpanzee de-licing my child but it was so much more effective than the fancy treatments I had previously used. She said the conditioner would smother and stun the lice and it did.

[ivywells]

The essential oils mentioned should be used with caution and always patch-tested. They can cause anything from a mild rash to severe blistering, which could be made much worse by sun exposure. Anyone considering using them should do a lot of research from reputable sources about dilution rates before applying them to their skin and especially their scalp!

[fakehistoryhunter]

THANK YOU for this, I've been combatting myths about hygiene for ages, much appreciated.

The idea that sex happened at medieval bath houses is probably a bit of a misconception, the church was clutching pearls over mixed bathing but most bath houses were places where families gathered and often didn't even allow prostitutes to use them, let alone look for customers there.
There were some brothels with bathing options but bath houses don't deserve their naughty reputation.

Plagues did often start in bath houses and/or spread from there but mostly just because these places were so popular and taking off your clothes might make fleas move from one set to another.
Many of the texts about avoiding baths were about avoiding bath houses, not bathing per say, people continued to bathe even after bath houses were (temporarily) closed during outbreaks.

Also, yes, people keep thinking they're better than their ancestors, you may like the term 'Chronological Snobbery' I recently found :)

Oh btw, shared your video on twitter where I have a few followers.

[lenkamaresova]

The point about people being more concerned with hygiene reminded me of something my mom said abuout bed bugs. My gradma came from poor working class family, where such things were concern and when my mom was young, she still performed the expected monthly clean which considered also of stripping all the beds in household to the frames, wiping the frames, airing the mattressess and then assembling them again. This dissassembling, cleaning, putting together was also for closets etc. All those furniture pieces could be cleaned like that, from solid wood, then. It was a measure against bed bugs and such.
You cannot do it today, and if you get a bed bugs, you are screwed.

[missanne]

I wore a plaster body cast for six months when I was twenty. Baths and showers were out of the question, and I had to make do with soap and a washcloth. I had a pan to soak my feet. It wasn't emotionally satisfying given that I was used to daily showers, but it did keep me perfectly clean. The sweat and oil glands of the skin under the cast stopped working so that the skin became desiccated, so wearing a cast wasn't that gross.

[ComatoseCupcake]

In the 90s when I was in 2nd grade, my elementary school had a very persistent lice outbreak. Like a bad one. We kept passing them around. My best friend and her sister had to have their heads shaved because they got them so bad. Eventually the school actually closed for a few days and they like fumigated the whole building and it finally stopped. Anyway, the chemical treatments were super harsh on me and burned my skin. Someone told my mom to use mayonnaise. So she slathered like half a jar of Mayo on my head and I had to keep it under a shower cap for like 2 hours and then she washed it out and combed the dead lice and nits out. It worked every time and it wasn't painful like the lice products from the store. If my kids get them I'm definitely trying that before the store bought stuff.

[Kate-the-Curst]

My mum, who grew up very very poor just post WWII in Australia, became a bit of a hedgewitch out of necessity. She ALWAYS has rosemary and lavender growing, and a rosemary tea rinse was always our first line treatment for lice.

[sapientisessevolo]

Learning historical hygiene is a funny thing. One the one hand, linen underwear, combing, frequent cleaning, on the other hand doctors didn't wash hands between patients until despite washing their hands before eating

But I think we can agree that some historical methods are still great (rotating clothing, combing as a part of hair cleaning not just styling, etc). Even sustainable and economical (sustainomical?)!

[bonnielundholm]

My first grade teacher in 1973/74 got her hair washed and set every weekend. Her hair was in a big pile of curls on the top of her head on Monday, then would be smaller/flatter each day. When I asked her about her hair, she told me this and that she wore a cap to bed to keep the curls in place. (Asking things like this is probably one of the reasons she didn't like me.) My mom said it was a common practice in the 1950s. Just an interesting tidbit.