How Gross Was the Past, Really?

Try Shortform and get a free trial and 25% off the annual plan here: https://www.shortform.com/axen Right now you're clean. Hot water, soap, toilet paper, a flushing toilet. You live in conditions most humans who ever existed would consider a miracle. Most of them didn't have any of that. And what they did instead was, in some cases, genuinely stomach-turning. This video goes through all of it. The Roman shared sponge. The shared bathwater where the baby always went last. The chamber pot emptied out the window every morning. The surgeon who never washed his hands. The urine that cleaned your clothes. All verified. All real. All worse than you probably imagined. In this video: The Roman tersorium — a sea sponge on a stick shared by everyone in the public latrine. What people used before toilet paper existed (corncobs, moss, leaves, smooth pebbles). How entire households bathed in the same water in order of social rank — and why the baby always ended up in cold brown sludge. The chamber pot under the bed and how "gardez l'eau" became the word "loo." The Great Stink of 1858 when London's open sewer made Parliament unable to function. How Richard III had roundworm and Ferdinand II of Naples had both head and pubic lice simultaneously. How bloodletting was the standard treatment for almost everything for 2,000 years. How George Washington's doctors removed half his blood supply treating a throat infection he would otherwise have survived. How Ignaz Semmelweis proved handwashing saved lives in 1847 and was committed to a psychiatric institution for suggesting it. Every person who lived through this thought it was normal. They were doing their best with what they knew. They just knew considerably less than we do. DISCLAIMER: Historical practices presented for educational purposes. Archaeological findings referenced are from peer-reviewed publications cited below. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ For business inquiries: [email protected] ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ #history #weirdhistory #medievalhistory #historyfacts #grosshistory