The Good Old Days, or Were They?

Ever yearn for the good old days?  As it turns out, the good old days weren’t so good after all.  Here are some reasons why.

In ancient times, soap didn’t even exist.  If you wanted to clean yourself you had to use oil or sand or just plain water.  Since no one hardly ever bathed, it wasn’t much of an issue.  But then, that brings us to another reason you should be glad you weren’t around back then.  Can you imagine how bad every one smelled?

During most of the Middle Ages, very few people knew how to read and write, including kings and emperors.  Because clergymen were virtually the only literate people around, entire nations were at the mercy of the church.

Even in the times after soap was invented, most people had to bathe in bathhouses.  In late medieval towns, most bathhouses became the habitat for loose women and lecherous men as family life deteriorated.  The medieval word for bathhouse was “stew” and for awhile was the English synonym for brothel.

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Posing for a picture in 1837 was an ordeal in itself.  Making a daguerreotype photograph required a fifteen minute exposure.  The photographer would usually use a clamp in order to keep the subject’s head still for that long.

It is a common misconception that most colonial American families had multi-generational hoseholds.  Nothing could be futher from the truth.  In fact few people lived long enough to see their children grown, let alone their grandchildren.  Dr. Benjamin Ruch, a prominent physician in 1790, compiled the data of one hundred people born in a given year in Philadelphia.  He discovered that one third of them died before the age of six and only thenty five percent lived beyond the age of twenty six.

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Eighteenth century Venice was a society gone mad.  Gambling went on night and day.  One evening in 1762, the Abbe Grioni bet all his clothes on the turn of the wheel and lost.  As a result, he was forced to return to the monestary in the nude.  Nuns wore pearls and low cut gowns, and fought among themselves for the honor of serving as a mistress to visiting church officials.