Public bathing

As the percentage of dwellings containing private bathrooms has increased in some societies, the need for public baths has diminished, and they are now almost exclusively used recreationally.

According to John Keay, the "Great Bath" of Mohenjo Daro in present-day Pakistan was the size of 'a modest municipal swimming pool', complete with stairs leading down to the water at each one of its ends.

Later gymnasia had indoor basins set overhead, the open maws of marble lions offering showers, and circular pools with tiers of steps for lounging.

In contemporary times, many, but not all administrative regions forbid nude mixed gender public baths, with exceptions for children under a certain age when accompanied by parents.

Nude bathing is quite uncommon; many people still use kain jarik (usually batik clothes or sarong) wrapped around their bodies to cover their genitals.

By AD 300 the Baths of Diocletian would cover 140,000 square metres (1,500,000 sq ft), its soaring granite and porphyry sheltering 3,000 bathers a day.

[17] Roman baths became "something like a cross between an aqua centre and a theme park", with pools, exercise spaces, game rooms, gardens, even libraries, and theatres.

[20][21][22] Muslim bathhouses, also called hammams (from Arabic: حمّام, romanized: ḥammām) or "Turkish baths" (mainly by westerners due to the bath's association with the Ottoman Empire), are historically found across the Middle East, North Africa, al-Andalus (Islamic Spain and Portugal), Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and in central and eastern Europe under Ottoman rule.

[20][21][23] Archaeological remains attest to the existence of bathhouses in the Islamic world as early as the Umayyad period (7th–8th centuries) and their importance has persisted up to modern times.

On Tisha B'Av, the fast day marking the commemoration of the Second Temple's destruction, Jews are not permitted to visit the public bath house.

[25] In the Minor tractate Kallah Rabbati (chapter 10), the early Sages of Israel instructed on what should be the conduct of every Jew who enters a public bath.

Before a Jew enters a public bath, he is first required to offer a short prayer unto God, requesting that no offensive act befall him there.

[26][27] These strictures were enacted in order to discourage developing any close bond and connection with another bather that might, otherwise, lead to inappropriate behavior while both men are naked.

A notable exception to this trend was in Finland and Scandinavia, where the sauna remained a popular phenomenon, even expanding during the Reformation period, when European bath houses were being destroyed.

They are found on the lake shore, in private apartments, corporate headquarters, at the Parliament House and even at the depth of 1,400 metres (4,600 ft) in Pyhäsalmi Mine.

[43] In 1832, during a cholera epidemic, Wilkinson took the initiative to offer the use of her house and yard to neighbours to wash their clothes, at a charge of a penny per week,[41] and showed them how to use a chloride of lime (bleach) to get them clean.

[47] On 19 November 1844, it was decided that the working class members of society should have the opportunity to access baths, in an attempt to address the health problems of the public.

After a number of unsuccessful attempts, Barter opened the first bath of this type at St Ann's Hydropathic Establishment near Blarney, County Cork, Ireland.

[52] The following year, the first public bath of its type to be built in mainland Britain since Roman times was opened in Manchester, and the idea spread rapidly.

It reached London in July 1860, when Roger Evans, a member of one of Urquhart's Foreign Affairs Committees, opened a Turkish bath at 5 Bell Street, near Marble Arch.

During the following 150 years, over 700 Turkish baths opened in Britain, including those built by municipal authorities as part of swimming pool complexes.

Urquhart's influence was also felt outside the Empire when in 1861, Dr Charles H Shepard opened the first Turkish baths in the United States at 63 Columbia Street, Brooklyn Heights, New York, most probably on 3 October 1863.

Traditionally, the family washed their bodies completely once a week before the day of the Bible-prescribed rest (Sunday) as having a (steam) bath meant having to get and bring in a considerable amount of firewood and water and spending time off other farm work heating the bathhouse.

While the richer urban circles could afford to have an individual bathroom with a bathtub in their apartments (since the late 19th century with running water), the lower classes necessarily used public steambaths – special big buildings which were equipped with developed side catering services enjoyed by the merchants with a farming background.

Since the first half of the 20th century running unheated drinking water supply has been made available virtually to all inhabitants of multi-story apartment buildings in cities, but if such dwellings were built during the 1930s and not updated later, they do not have hot running water (except for central heating) or space to accommodate a bathtub, plumbing facilities being limited in them only to a kitchen sink and a small toilet room with a toilet seat.

Thus the dwellers of such apartments, on a par with those living in the part of pre-1917-built blocks of flats which had not undergone cardinal renovation, would have no choice but to use public bathhouses.

[55] In an 1897 comparison to Pittsburgh, which had no municipal baths, Philadelphia was equipped with a dozen, "distributed through the very poorest quarters of the city," each with a concrete pool and 80 dressing rooms.

[57] A New York state law of 1895 required every city over 50,000 in population maintain as many public baths as their Boards of Health deemed necessary, providing hot and cold water for at least 14 hours a day.

[58] Despite that mandate, the first civic bathhouse in New York City, the Rivington Street municipal bath on the Lower East Side, opened five years later.

[55] Other notable constructions of the period/include Bathhouse Row[59] in the spa resort town of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and the Asser Levy Public Baths in New York City, completed in 1908.