[HN Gopher] Filthy Romans: Dirty secrets of the bath-obsessed an...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Filthy Romans: Dirty secrets of the bath-obsessed ancients (2016)
        
       Author : revolucien
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2023-08-11 12:22 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.newscientist.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.newscientist.com)
        
       | postmeta wrote:
       | better analysis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermae_Romae
        
         | greggsy wrote:
         | Describes a manga series on the topic, but adds little to the
         | discussion
        
           | bigbacaloa wrote:
           | This must be the most humorless site on the net.
        
           | Groxx wrote:
           | +1 to this. The episode descriptions also don't seem to have
           | much of anything to do with sanitation consequences of shared
           | baths.
           | 
           | Not that I expect deep analyses of the consequences of the
           | protagonist's actions in an isekai, of course.
        
       | pseingatl wrote:
       | Those in the Middle East are horrified by the lack of hygiene in
       | the West. Imagine, using dry paper to clean your posterior.
        
         | flextheruler wrote:
         | Isn't the Burj Khalifa not even hooked up to the sewer system
         | so all the feces and urine is loaded onto trucks daily?
         | 
         | Also open air sewers are still common in a lot of places, an
         | Iranian American friend of mine claimed he almost fell into one
         | as a kid.
        
         | laserdancepony wrote:
         | Generalization par excellence. I've been there and won't concur
         | with your assessment.
        
         | lm28469 wrote:
         | You've probably ever been in the middle east then...
        
       | joebiden2 wrote:
       | The wordy article boils down to: the baths were infested by
       | bacteria and worms due to insufficient water cleaning.
       | Interesting, but could be compressed to 2-3 paragraphs without
       | losing any detail.
       | 
       | Thanks for posting though.
        
         | User3456335 wrote:
         | Some other interesting things from the article that stuck with
         | me:
         | 
         | - Most toilets weren't connected to the sewers because they
         | didn't want to have the smell of the sewers in their houses -
         | The public latrines were considered a bad choice because of
         | lack of privacy and shared spunges (based on texts on the
         | walls) - The sewers were built mainly for the convenience of
         | not having to transport water to and from within the city, not
         | necessarily for hygiene reasons - Apparently some emperor did
         | realize that it wasn't smart to bathe with sick and healthy
         | people at the same time but decided the sick would bathe before
         | the healthy
         | 
         | Of course, if you only wanted to know if they cleaned the water
         | in bath houses sufficiently, then your summary suffices as
         | well.
        
       | brudgers wrote:
       | archive, https://archive.ph/Y1un4
        
         | phyzome wrote:
         | I'm gonna need a captcha bypasser to access this site that does
         | paywall-bypassing...
        
           | brnaftr361 wrote:
           | Same here, been served a loop all week long.
        
           | mulmen wrote:
           | Wow, it's actually just broken? I managed to attempt to solve
           | two but got stuck in a look and then the third try the
           | captcha renders off the screen.
        
           | gunapologist99 wrote:
           | their implementation is badly broken. Usually with google's
           | recaptcha you get to a second screen, but I never even see
           | that second screen on this site.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-08-12 23:01 UTC)