Doctors were torn on personal hygiene. Some believed bodily oils were important to maintain health, while others believed cleanliness helped keep disease and illness away. What made it more difficult was religious ideology.

Puritans thought a lack of cleanliness went with the devil and sin, connections that had social implications. Cleanliness for them was connected to morality, so those who bathed were less likely to sin. Water purified from head to toe, with the “filthiness of person engendering filthiness of mind.”

Clean bodies, clothes, households, and settlements all contributed to spiritual health. Puritans had a hard time accepting that bathing could have negative implications for morality since public baths often contributed to disease and sexual immorality.

There were no real dentists then, so a tooth that needed to be pulled meant a visit to the barber, surgeon, apothecary, or the blacksmith. Toothaches were dealt with using natural remedies like figs, chamomile, alcohol, and opium.

Keeping teeth clean wasn’t a concern then, though replacing a pulled tooth was common. The extracted tooth could even be put back into the socket.

Dentures and implants were commonly used. New teeth were taken from the poor willing to sell theirs, so wood, ivory and metal were often shaped to use.

The most famous denture-wearer was George Washington. He wore dentures made from metal, wire, and animal teeth. His mouthpiece caused him pain which distorted the shape of his face.

The middle and upper classes wore powdered wigs made out of human and animal hair, often keeping their own hair short.

Lice was common, so shaving one’s head prevented bugs from infesting. Wigs, however, were vulnerable to bugs, so to keep them clean and presentable, these people sent them for treatment or had slaves and servants “dress” the wigs.

Wigs were cared for weekly, but it was costly so people sometimes went weeks or months without a proper cleaning. Wigs were even boiled to get rid of lice, often covered in fragrances that repelled bugs.

Common scents were bergamot, bay leaves, and sassafras. Powders and oils also helped hide the smell of the person and the hair, but the pomades used to style wigs would attract insects that would still get stuck in the sticky substance.

Colonial households had outhouses, basically a covered hole in the ground, by the cabin. If someone couldn’t or didn’t visit the outhouse, there was a chamberpot inside.

Chamberpots needed to be emptied regularly, meaning they were dumped out of a window or near the house. In rural settings, people lived near water so human waste found its way into streams, rivers, and lakes. That contaminated water, spreading disease inevitably.

Urban centers like Philadelphia had privy pots excavated in 2014, revealing more than your typical household and human waste.

Archaeologists discovered a dozen brick-lined privy shafts behind an illegal tavern. They soon unearthed glasses, bottles, bowls, and drinking tankards. There were tanning supplies, wig curlers, and pottery which were made and used by local artisans.

Archaeologist Rebecca Yamin said that human waste was present but the find, dating from around the Revolutionary War, gave a sense of “people drinking and talking politics and arguing.”

In the 1990’s, archaeologists found a silver earpicker at the site of the original fort at Jamestown. It dates to the early decades of the 17th century, with a pointed pick at one end and a small scooping tool at the other.

Earpicks would be used as toothpicks, to clean out one’s fingernails, and other hygienic tasks.

The spoon-like side may have been used to remove earwax, but it also proved useful since in lieu of beeswax, earwax was applied to thread to prevent it from unraveling.

Wealthy colonists imported fragrant soaps from Europe, but most of them made their own soap or just purchased it locally. Lye soap was made from a mixture of animal fat, lye, and ash, which was harsh and used to clean clothes, dishes, and parts of the home.

Lye soap was made without measuring, with the process often time-consuming and smelly.

Doing laundry was much more difficult. It was a harsh concoction, then they had to haul water, heat fires, wring clothes, and hanging items to dry, adding to an already exhausting task.

Clothes that got the dirtiest like underwear, aprons, diapers were the ones washed with any amount of regularity.

Outhouses and privy pots were usually close to water sources and living quarters. The streets were often lined with animal waste, garbage, and refuse of all kinds so disease was common for the time.

Dysentery, cholera, and typhoid fever were ailments that were prevalent during the hotter months.

There was an outbreak of “bloody flux” in Boston in 1676 which claimed the lives of many children in the city. The leader of Bacon’s Rebellion, Nathaniel Bacon Jr., succumbed to the disease in the same year.

George Washington and his troops camped at Valley Forge in December 1777, but an outbreak had nearly two-thirds of Washington’s 2,000 troop army dying of dysentery, typhoid, and influenza.

Campaigning during the summer was dangerous as military commanders knew, although outbreaks of disease may have stopped a large number of British troops in the South.

Captain John Smith (1580-1631), was an explorer, settler, and key figure in the administration of the Jamestown colony, and he wrote about his impressions of the Americas. He described “musketas and flies” and “a certaine India Bug, called by the Spaniards a Cacarooch, the which creeping into Chests they eat and defile with their ill-scented dung.”

Smith also called ants troublesome.

Colonists had to endure lice, with George Washington (1732-1799) saying that his blanket was full of “double its Weight of Vermin such as Lice, Fleas, etc.”

Aa a young man on an excursion through the Shenandoah Valley in 1748, Washington found himself in a bug-infested cabin so he learned to sleep outside and close to the fire on his future outings.

Christian missionary George Henry Loskiel had major problems with bugs, “a troublesome plague to both man and beast” called “living ashes.” Natives gave the name since, according to Loskiel, the bites were “as painful as the burning of red-hot ashes.”

The earliest European settlers didn’t shave. Smooth, hair-free faces became common only during the mid-18th century. Men would visit barbers when they wanted a shave. Shaves were done by skilled barbers with straight razors.

A barber was considered a lowly profession due to its racial implications. Slaves shaved their masters while free nonwhites would work as barbers in a society which saw white labor as too valuable for the task.

There’s not much evidence to suggest that women shaved any part of their bodies. The women then showed no significant amount of skin.

Hair on a woman’s face wasn’t shaved, since shaving was dangerous and “bloodbaths could only be prevented by experienced hands.”

Women possibly plucked hairs or used depilatory creams. Several recipes in medical handbooks circulated in England and the colonies, specifically The Birth of Mankind (1540), which had recipes for depilatories combining limestone, arsenic, and other substances.

The Revolutionary War had George Washington declaring that sanitation and cleanliness was “essential to health and service,” ordering his officers to be alert should any disease or contagion enter the camps.

His main concern was smallpox (later calling for troops to be inoculated against it), but military camps bred disease and Washington knew it.

Soldiers were required to wash their shirts weekly, even cleaning their faces and hands daily but many ignored these orders.

To maintain camp cleanliness, “followers”, as they were known, traveled with the military. They cooked and cleaned for the men along the way. Women provided essential services who, from a witness’s perspective, were “not used to doing things of this sort… [and] let their linen, etc., rot upon their backs than to be at the trouble of cleaning themselves.”

Some of the Founding Fathers were clear in how they perceived the cleanliness of women. Thomas Jefferson told his daughter, Martha, “nothing is so disgusting to our sex as a want of cleanliness and delicacy in yours.”

In the 18th century, doctors advised women to bathe to help cure illnesses that affected female reproductive organs.

Thomas Ewell, a doctor from Virginia, said that women “were so constituted as to become offensive to the nose… for the purpose of suppressing too ardent devotion of males,” cleanliness was of the higher order. Women may use smell as “a [means of] defense… to ensure protection, by rendering themselves as disgusting as possible.”