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for all classes. Granada is the spot in Europe where to-day we find the
most exquisite remains of Mohammedan culture, and, though the fury of
Christian conquest dragged the harrow over the soil of Granada, even yet
streams and fountains spring up there and gush abundantly and one seldom
loses the sound of the plash of water. The flower of Christian chivalry
and Christian intelligence went to Palestine to wrest the Holy Sepulchre
from the hands of pagan Mohammedans. They found there many excellent
things which they had not gone out to seek, and the Crusaders produced a
kind of premature and abortive Renaissance, the shadow of lost classic
things reflected on Christian Europe from the mirror of Islam.
Yet it is worth while to point out, as bearing on the
associations of the bath here emphasized, that even in Islam we
may trace the existence of a religious attitude unfavorable to
the bath. Before the time of Mohammed there were no public baths
in Arabia, and it was and is believed that baths are specially
haunted by the djinn--the evil spirits. Mohammed himself was at
first so prejudiced against public baths that he forbade both men
and women to enter them. Afterward, however, he permitted men to
use them provided they wore a cloth round the loins, and women
also when they could not conveniently bathe at home.
Among the
Prophet's sayings is found the assertion: "Whatever woman enters
a bath the devil is with her," and "All the earth is given to me
as a place of prayer, and as pure, except the burial ground and
the bath." (See, e.g., E.W. Lane, _Arabian Society in the Middle
Ages_, 1883, pp. 179-183.) Although, therefore, the bath, or
_hammam_, on grounds of ritual ablution, hygiene, and enjoyment
speedily became universally popular in Islam among all classes
and both sexes, Mohammed himself may be said to have opposed it.
Among the discoveries which the Crusaders made and brought home with them
one of the most notable was that of the bath, which in its more elaborate
forms seems to have been absolutely forgotten in Europe, though Roman
baths might everywhere have been found underground. All authorities seem
to be agreed in finding here the origin of the revival of the public bath.
It is to Rome first, and later to Islam, the lineal inheritor of classic
culture, that we owe the cult of water and of physical purity. Even to-day
the Turkish bath, which is the most popular of elaborate methods of
bathing, recalls by its characteristics and its name the fact that it is a
Mohammedan survival of Roman life.
From the twelfth century onward baths have repeatedly been introduced from
the East, and reintroduced afresh in slightly modified forms, and have
flourished with varying degrees of success. In the thirteenth century they
were very common, especially in Paris, and though they were often used,
more especially in Germany, by both sexes in common, every effort was made
to keep them orderly and respectable. These efforts were, however, always
unsuccessful in the end. A bath always tended in the end to become a
brothel, and hence either became unfashionable or was suppressed by the
authorities. It is sufficient to refer to the reputation in England of
"hot-houses" and "bagnios." It was not until toward the end of the
eighteenth century that it began to be recognized that the claims of
physical cleanliness were sufficiently imperative to make it necessary
that the fairly avoidable risks to morality in bathing should be avoided
and the unavoidable risks bravely incurred. At the present day, now that
we are accustomed to weave ingeniously together in the texture of our
lives the conflicting traditions of classic and Christian days, we have
almost persuaded ourselves that the pagan virtue of cleanliness comes next
after godliness, and we bathe, forgetful of the great moral struggle which
once went on around the bath. But we refrain from building ourselves
palaces to bathe in, and for the most part we bathe with exceeding
moderation.[23] It is probable that we may best harmonize our conflicting
traditions by rejecting not only the Christian glorification of dirt, but
also, save for definitely therapeutic purposes, the excessive heat,
friction, and stimulation involved by the classic forms of bathing. Our
reasonable ideal should render it easy and natural for every man, woman,
and child to have a simple bath, tepid in winter, cold in summer, all the
year round.
For the history of the bath in mediæval times and later Europe,
see A. Franklin, _Les Soins de Toilette_, in the _Vie Privée
d'Autrefois_ series; Rudeck, _Geschichte der öffentlichen
Sittlichkeit in Deutschland_; T. Wright, _The Homes of Other
Days_; E. Dühren, _Das Geschlechtsleben in England_, bd. 1.
Outside the Church, there was a greater amount of cleanliness
than we are sometimes apt to suppose. It may, indeed, be said
that the uncleanliness of holy men and women would have attracted
no attention if it had corresponded to the condition generally
prevailing. Before public baths were established bathing in
private was certainly practiced; thus Ordericus Vitalis, in
narrating the murder of Mabel, the Countess de Montgomery, in
Normandy in 1082, casually mentions that she was lying on the bed
after her bath (_Ecclesiastical History_, Book V, Chapter XIII).
In warm weather, it would appear, mediæval ladies bathed in
streams, as we may still see countrywomen do in Russia, Bohemia,
and occasionally nearer home. The statement of the historian
Michelet, therefore, that Percival, Iseult, and the other
ethereal personages of mediæval times "certainly never washed"
(_La Sorcière_, p. 110) requires some qualification.
In 1292 there were twenty-six bathing establishments in Paris,
and an attendant would go through the streets in the morning
announcing that they were ready. One could have a vapor bath only
or a hot bath to succeed it, as in the East. No woman of bad
reputation, leper, or vagabond was at this time allowed to
frequent the baths, which were closed on Sundays and feast-days.
By the fourteenth century, however, the baths began to have a
reputation for immorality, as well as luxury, and, according to
Dufour, the baths of Paris "rivaled those of imperial Rome: love,
prostitution, and debauchery attracted the majority to the
bathing establishments, where everything was covered by a decent
veil." He adds that, notwithstanding the scandal thus caused and
the invectives of preachers, all went to the baths, young and
old, rich and poor, and he makes the statement, which seems to
echo the constant assertion of the early Fathers, that "a woman
who frequented the baths returned home physically pure only at
the expense of her moral purity."
In Germany there was even greater freedom of manners in bathing,
though, it would seem, less real licentiousness.
Even the
smallest towns had their baths, which were frequented by all
classes. As soon as the horn blew to announce that the baths were
ready all hastened along the street, the poorer folk almost
completely undressing themselves before leaving their homes.
Bathing was nearly always in common without any garment being
worn, women attendants commonly rubbed and massaged both sexes,
and the dressing room was frequently used by men and women in
common; this led to obvious evils. The Germans, as Weinhold
points out (_Die Deutschen Frauen im Mittelalter_, 1882, bd. ii,
pp. 112 et seq.), have been fond of bathing in the open air in
streams from the days of Tacitus and Cæsar until comparatively
modern times, when the police have interfered. It was the same in
Switzerland. Poggio, early in the sixteenth century, found it the
custom for men and women to bathe together at Baden, and said
that he seemed to be assisting at the _floralia_ of ancient Rome,
or in Plato's Republic. Sénancour, who quotes the passage (_De
l'Amour_, 1834, vol. i, p. 313), remarks that at the beginning of
the nineteenth century there was still great liberty at the Baden
baths.
Of the thirteenth century in England Thomas Wright (_Homes of
Other Days_, 1871, p. 271) remarks: "The practice of warm bathing
prevailed very generally in all classes of society, and is
frequently alluded to in the mediæval romances and stories. For
this purpose a large bathing-tub was used. People sometimes
bathed immediately after rising in the morning, and we find the
bath used after dinner and before going to bed. A bath was also
often prepared for a visitor on his arrival from a journey; and,
what seems still more singular, in the numerous stories of
amorous intrigues the two lovers usually began their interviews
by bathing together."
In England the association between bathing and immorality was
established with special rapidity and thoroughness.
Baths were
here officially recognized as brothels, and this as early as the
twelfth century, under Henry II. These organized bath-brothels
were confined to Southwark, outside the walls of the city, a
quarter which was also given up to various sports and amusements.
At a later period, "hot-houses," bagnios, and hummums (the
eastern _hammam_) were spread all over London and remained
closely identified with prostitution, these names, indeed,
constantly tending to become synonymous with brothels. (T.
Wright, _Homes of Other Days_, 1871, pp. 494-496, gives an
account of them.)
In France the baths, being anathematized by both Catholics and
Huguenots, began to lose vogue and disappear.
"Morality gained,"
remarks Franklin, "but cleanliness lost." Even the charming and
elegant Margaret of Navarre found it quite natural for a lady to
mention incidentally to her lover that she had not washed her
hands for a week. Then began an extreme tendency to use
cosmetics, essences, perfumes, and a fierce war with vermin, up
to the seventeenth century, when some progress was made, and
persons who desired to be very elegant and refined were
recommended to wash their faces "nearly every day."
Even in 1782,
however, while a linen cloth was advised for the purpose of
cleaning the face and hands, the use of water was still somewhat
discountenanced. The use of hot and cold baths was now, however,
beginning to be established in Paris and elsewhere, and the
bathing establishments at the great European health resorts were
also beginning to be put on the orderly footing which is now
customary. When Casanova, in the middle of the eighteenth
century, went to the public baths at Berne he was evidently
somewhat surprised when he found that he was invited to choose
his own attendant from a number of young women, and when he
realized that these attendants were, in all respects, at the
disposition of the bathers. It is evident that establishments of
this kind were then already dying out, although it may be added
that the customs described by Casanova appear to have persisted
in Budapest and St. Petersburg almost or quite up to the present.
The great European public baths have long been above suspicion in
this respect (though homosexual practices are not quite
excluded), while it is well recognized that many kinds of hot
baths now in use produce a powerfully stimulating action upon the
sexual system, and patients taking such baths for medical
purposes are frequently warned against giving way to these
influences.
The struggle which in former ages went on around bathing
establishments has now been in part transferred to massage
establishments. Massage is an equally powerful stimulant to the
skin and the sexual sphere,--acting mainly by friction instead of
mainly by heat,--and it has not yet attained that position of
general recognition and popularity which, in the case of bathing
establishments, renders it bad policy to court disrepute.
Like bathing, massage is a hygienic and therapeutic method of
influencing the skin and subjacent tissues which, together with
its advantages, has certain concomitant disadvantages in its
liability to affect the sexual sphere. This influence is apt to
be experienced by individuals of both sexes, though it is perhaps
specially marked in women. Jouin (quoted in Paris _Journal de
Médecine_, April 23, 1893) found that of 20 women treated by
massage, of whom he made inquiries, 14 declared that they
experienced voluptuous sensations; 8 of these belonged to
respectable families; the other 6 were women of the _demimonde_
and gave precise details; Jouin refers in this connection to the
_aliptes_ of Rome. It is unnecessary to add that the gynæcological massage introduced in recent years by the Swedish
teacher of gymnastics, Thure-Brandt, as involving prolonged
rubbing and kneading of the pelvic regions,
"_pression glissante
du vagin_" etc. (_Massage Gynécologique_, by G. de Frumerie,
1897), whatever its therapeutic value, cannot fail in a large
proportion of cases to stimulate the sexual emotions. (Eulenburg
remarks that for sexual anæsthesia in women the Thure-Brandt
system of massage may "naturally" be recommended, _Sexuale
Neuropathie_, p. 78.) I have been informed that in London and
elsewhere massage establishments are sometimes visited by women
who seek sexual gratification by massage of the genital regions
by the _masseuse_.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] "_Dicens munditiam corporis atque vestitus animæ esse
immunditiam_"--St. Jerome, _Ad Eustochium Virginem_.
[22] With regard to the physiological mechanism by which bathing produces
its tonic and stimulating effects Woods Hutchinson has an interesting
discussion (Chapter VII) in his _Studies in Human and Comparative
Pathology_.
[23] Thus among the young women admitted to the Chicago Normal School to
be trained as teachers, Miss Lura Sanborn, the director of physical
training, states (_Doctor's Magazine_, December, 1900) that a bath once a
fortnight is found to be not unusual.
V.
Summary--Fundamental Importance of Touch--The Skin the Mother of All the
Other Senses.
The sense of touch is so universally diffused over the whole skin, and in
so many various degrees and modifications, and it is, moreover, so truly
the Alpha and the Omega of affection, that a broken and fragmentary
treatment of the subject has been inevitable.
The skin is the archæological field of human and prehuman experience, the
foundation on which all forms of sensory perception have grown up, and as
sexual sensibility is among the most ancient of all forms of sensibility,
the sexual instinct is necessarily, in the main, a comparatively slightly
modified form of general touch sensibility. This primitive character of
the great region of tactile sensation, its vagueness and diffusion, the
comparatively unintellectual as well as unæsthetic nature of the mental
conceptions which arise on the tactile basis make it difficult to deal
precisely with the psychology of touch. The very same qualities, however,
serve greatly to heighten the emotional intensity of skin sensations. So
that, of all the great sensory fields, the field of touch is at once the
least intellectual and the most massively emotional.
These qualities, as
well as its intimate and primitive association with the apparatus of
tumescence and detumescence, make touch the readiest and most powerful
channel by which the sexual sphere may be reached.
In disentangling the phenomena of tactile sensibility ticklishness has
been selected for special consideration as a kind of sensation, founded on
reflexes developing even before birth, which is very closely related to
sexual phenomena. It is, as it were, a play of tumescence, on which
laughter supervenes as a play of detumescence. It leads on to the more
serious phenomena of tumescence, and it tends to die out after
adolescence, at the period during which sexual relationships normally
begin. Such a view of ticklishness, as a kind of modesty of the skin,
existing merely to be destroyed, need only be regarded as one of its
aspects. Ticklishness certainly arose from a non-sexual starting-point,
and may well have protective uses in the young animal.
The readiness with which tactile sensibility takes on a sexual character
and forms reflex channels of communication with the sexual sphere proper
is illustrated by the existence of certain secondary sexual foci only
inferior in sexual excitability to the genital region.
We have seen that
the chief of these normal foci are situated in the orificial regions where
skin and mucous membrane meet, and that the contact of any two orificial
regions between two persons of different sex brought together under
favorable conditions is apt, when prolonged, to produce a very intense
degree of sexual erethism. This is a normal phenomenon in so far as it is
a part of tumescence, and not a method of obtaining detumescence. The kiss
is a typical example of these contacts, while the nipple is of special
interest in this connection, because we are thereby enabled to bring the
psychology of lactation into intimate relationship with the psychology of
sexual love.
The extreme sensitiveness of the skin, the readiness with which its
stimulation reverberates into the sexual sphere, clearly brought out by
the present study, enable us to understand better a very ancient
contest--the moral struggle around the bath. There has always been a
tendency for the extreme cultivation of physical purity to lead on to the
excessive stimulation of the sexual sphere; so that the Christian ascetics
were entirely justified, on their premises, in fighting against the bath
and in directly or indirectly fostering a cult of physical uncleanliness.
While, however, in the past there has clearly been a general tendency for
the cult of physical purity to be associated with moral licentiousness,
and there are sufficient grounds for such an association, it is important
to remember that it is not an inevitable and fatal association; a
scrupulously clean person is by no means necessarily impelled to
licentiousness; a physically unclean person is by no means necessarily
morally pure. When we have eliminated certain forms of the bath which must
be regarded as luxuries rather than hygienic necessities, though they
occasionally possess therapeutic virtues, we have eliminated the most
violent appeals of the bath to the sexual impulse. So imperative are the
demands of physical purity now becoming, in general opinion, that such
small risks to moral purity as may still remain are constantly and wisely
disregarded, and the immoral traditions of the bath now, for the most
part, belong to the past.
SMELL.
I.
The Primitiveness of Smell--The Anatomical Seat of the Olfactory
Centres--Predominance of Smell among the Lower Mammals--
Its Diminished
Importance in Man--The Attention Paid to Odors by Savages.
The first more highly organized sense to arise on the diffused tactile
sensitivity of the skin is, in most cases, without doubt that of smell. At
first, indeed, olfactory sensibility is not clearly differentiated from
general tactile sensibility; the pit of thickened and ciliated epithelium
or the highly mobile antennæ which in many lower animals are sensitive to
odorous stimuli are also extremely sensitive to tactile stimuli; this is,
for instance, the case with the snail, in whom at the same time olfactive
sensibility seems to be spread over the whole body.[24]
The sense of smell
is gradually specialized, and when taste also begins to develop a kind of
chemical sense is constituted. The organ of smell, however, speedily
begins to rise in importance as we ascend the zoölogical scale. In the
lower vertebrates, when they began to adopt a life on dry land, the sense
of smell seems to have been that part of their sensory equipment which
proved most useful under the new conditions, and it developed with
astonishing rapidity. Edinger finds that in the brain of reptiles the
"area olfactoria" is of enormous extent, covering, indeed, the greater
part of the cortex, though it may be quite true, as Herrick remarks, that,
while smell is preponderant, it is perhaps not correct to attribute an
exclusively olfactory tone to the cerebral activities of the _Sauropsida_
or even the _Ichthyopsida_. Among most mammals, however, in any case,
smell is certainly the most highly developed of the senses; it gives the
first information of remote objects that concern them; it gives the most
precise information concerning the near objects that concern them; it is
the sense in terms of which most of their mental operations must be
conducted and their emotional impulses reach consciousness. Among the apes
it has greatly lost importance and in man it has become almost
rudimentary, giving place to the supremacy of vision.
Prof. G. Elliot Smith, a leading authority on the brain, has well
summarized the facts concerning the predominance of the olfactory
region in the mammal brain, and his conclusions may be quoted. It
should be premised that Elliot Smith divides the brain into
rhinencephalon and neopallium. Rhinencephalon designates the
regions which are pre-eminently olfactory in function: the
olfactory bulb, its peduncle, the tuberculum olfactorium and
locus perforatus, the pyriform lobe, the paraterminal body, and
the whole hippocampal formation. The neopallium is the dorsal cap
of the brain, with frontal, parietal, and occipital areas,
comprehending all that part of the brain which is the seat of the
higher associative activities, reaching its fullest development
in man.
"In the early mammals the olfactory areas form by far the greater
part of the cerebral hemisphere, which is not surprising when it
is recalled that the forebrain is, in the primitive brain,
essentially an appendage, so to speak, of the smell apparatus.
When the cerebral hemisphere comes to occupy such a dominant
position in the brain it is perhaps not unnatural to find that
the sense of smell is the most influential and the chief source
of information to the animal; or, perhaps, it would be more
accurate to say that the olfactory sense, which conveys general
information to the animal such as no other sense can bring
concerning its prey (whether near or far, hidden or exposed), is
much the most serviceable of all the avenues of information to
the lowly mammal leading a terrestrial life, and therefore
becomes predominant; and its particular domain--the forebrain--becomes the ruling portion of the nervous system.
"This early predominance of the sense of smell persists in most
mammals (unless an aquatic mode of life interferes and deposes
it: compare the _Cetacea, Sirenia_, and _Pinnipedia_, for
example) even though a large neopallium develops to receive
visual, auditory, tactile, and other impressions pouring into the
forebrain. In the _Anthropoidea_ alone of nonaqua