10 Horrifying Historical Hygiene Practices

Throughout history, people have used many questionable methods to wipe after going to the bathroom. Newspapers, corn cobs, and even pottery shards. And these weren’t the only bizarre hygiene habits we’re glad humanity has left in the past.

From porridge deodorant to pee detergent, the ways people kept clean in the past will make you hug your toiletries extra tight tonight. Let’s explore some of the strangest historical hygiene habits, as adapted from the above episode of The List Show on YouTube.

1. Using Corn Cobs or a Farmers’ Almanac as Toilet Paper
2. Scraping Your Rear End With Pottery Shards
3. Using Ostrich Eggs or Porridge as Deodorant
4. Making Perfume Out of Cow and Sheep Fat
5. Cleaning Your Teeth With Burnt Ox Hooves
6. Using Mouthwash Made of Pee and Goat Milk
7. Washing Clothes With Urine
8. Drinking Pee and Storing Farts In Jars to Ward Off the Plague
9. Drinking Cheese Whey to Get Rid of Lice
10. Douching With Lysol

Using Corn Cobs or a Farmers’ Almanac as Toilet Paper

Without the luxury of toilet paper, early American colonists reached for the next best thing: corn cobs. In fact, corn cobs made such great TP that rural Americans continued the practice into the 20th century. 

On the toilet paper spectrum, corn cobs fall somewhere between “makes sense” and “oh no.” Closer to the “makes sense” end is any printed material: newspapers, the Sears catalog, the Farmers’ Almanac, you name it.

People used to bore a hole through their Farmers’ Almanac and hang it from a nail in their house or outhouse, be it for reading or for wiping. The custom became common enough that in 1919, publishers started selling it with a pre-drilled hole. 

Scraping Your Rear End With Pottery Shards

Firmly in “oh no” territory, on the other hand, are pottery shards. Ancient Greeks and Romans used these vaguely circular ceramic fragments, known as pessoi, to scrape their posteriors clean. It’s even been suggested that some pessoi began as ostraka: broken ceramics that ancient Athenians used as writing material. If, for example, your community was deciding whether to exile a certain menace to society, you voted by inscribing the person’s name on an ostrakon. (That’s where we got the word ostracize.) Repurposing these ostraka as dung scrapers is about as insulting as it gets.

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Using Ostrich Eggs or Porridge as Deodorant

In ancient Egypt, people used ostrich eggs in deodorant. One recipe called for some ostrich egg roasted with tortoise shell and tamarisk gallnut. The concoction was then rubbed all over your body to combat bad B.O. Another ancient Egyptian deodorant involved adding incense to porridge, forming it into balls, and sticking those balls in your armpits. 

But for every off-putting ancient hygiene practice, there are countless others that don’t sound so bad. Ancient Egyptians were also known to deodorize by rubbing themselves down with crushed carob pods. Carob has a nutty, cocoa-like flavor that makes it a popular chocolate substitute these days.

Making Perfume Out of Cow and Sheep Fat

Perfume enjoyed popularity pretty much everywhere in ancient times, though the manufacturing processes were much less industrial than our modern ones. Take enfleurage, a method used in ancient Rome. First, you’d procure some suet—the hard fat found around the kidneys and loins of cows and sheep. Then, you’d set some flower petals on top of the fat and let the scent seep in. Repeat that step with fresh petals for as long as it takes for the fat to get fully fragrant. Enfleurage was a great way to make perfume from especially fragile flowers, and it remained in use until the 20th century when higher-tech manufacturing methods eclipsed it.

According to Pliny the Elder, some of the most common scents in ancient Roman perfumes were pomegranate, cypress, and myrtle. Not to mention Acorus calamus, colloquially known as calamus or sweet root (pictured above). The Society of Scent describes calamus root as smelling like “wet cake dough, with a woody leathery/suede effect.” It’s also been compared to the odor of a milk truck and a shoe repair shop. 

Cleaning Your Teeth With Burnt Ox Hooves

Ancient Egyptians were early pioneers of breath mints, which they made by boiling honey with cinnamon, frankincense, and myrrh, and forming the goop into pellets. A little pungent for your palate, maybe, but not too far off from the homemade cough drop recipes currently all over the internet.

That said, dental care in general left something to be desired. Consider these cornerstones in ancient Egyptian toothpaste: volcanic pumice, ash from burnt ox hooves, eggshells, and oyster shells. In a world where toothbrushes had yet to be invented, people simply used their fingers to apply this very abrasive mixture to their teeth. 

Using Mouthwash Made of Pee and Goat Milk

Some ancient Romans kept their pearly whites pearly white with a mouthwash made of pee and goat milk. The poet Catullus wrote that “ … in the land of Celtiberia, whatever each man has urinated, with this he is accustomed in the morning to rub his teeth and gums until they are red, so that the more polished those teeth of yours are, the more urine they proclaim you to have drunk.”

Washing Clothes With Urine

The ammonia in urine is a bleaching agent. Ancient Romans also used it as laundry detergent. Workers known as fullones would place empty containers on street corners where passersby would relieve themselves. The fullones would then bring the full containers back to the laundromat and mix the urine with water in washing vats. Part of the washing process involved standing in the vat and stamping the grime out of the clothes—sort of like squashing grapes for wine.

In fact, urine was such a hot commodity in ancient Rome that Emperors Nero and Vespasian both taxed it. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, after Vespasian’s son Titus criticized his father for doing so, Vespasian held a coin earned from the tax to Titus’s nose and asked him if it stunk. When Titus said no, Vespasian replied, “Yet it comes from urine.” The exchange inspired the phrase pecunia non olet, meaning “money doesn’t stink.” In other words, money is money, no matter where it came from.

Drinking Pee and Storing Farts In Jars to Ward Off the Plague

In 16th-century Venice, a few sips of pee every day was said to keep the plague away. It wasn’t the only foul method of warding off the Black Death. In 17th-century London, many believed bad air was responsible for spreading the disease. So physicians recommended trying to overpower those noxious fumes with other strong odors. You could, for example, cohabitate with a filthy goat—or store your own farts in jars to be unleashed once the plague hits your hometown. 

Drinking Cheese Whey to Get Rid of Lice

When Renaissance-era folks weren’t dealing with the plague—or even when they were—lice might be wreaking havoc on their heads. But don’t worry, they had killer recipes to combat the critters. Here’s one circa 1600: “Take the [whey] that remayneth of cheese making and put to it a little vinaigre, and Drinke of it certayne Dayes: and all the lyce will Dye, and ther will breede no more a boute yow.”

Douching With Lysol

Disgusting as it is, the above beverage is hardly a health risk. The same can’t be said for the early 20th century’s most popular vaginal disinfectant: Lysol. At the time, Lysol contained a compound called “cresol,” which can be toxic if you’re exposed to too much of it. Mother Jones reported that “By 1911, doctors had recorded 193 Lysol poisonings and five deaths from uterine irrigation.” But advertisements touted the stuff as “gentle” and unharmful to “delicate tissue,” assuring “appealing daintiness.” 

They illustrated marriages gone wrong, stoking women’s fears of what would happen if they didn’t douche with Lysol. As Andrea Tone explored in her book Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, these ads harbored a coded message: that Lysol worked as birth control, and an unplanned pregnancy could wreck your marriage. These days, douching in general—and Lysol along with it—has been widely rejected as a safe or effective contraceptive. Porridge deodorant seems pretty quaint in comparison.