Of Other Showers. The control of hygiene since the 19th century through the shower and the bath-shower

Abstract

The shower is an instrument that, nowadays, takes part of our daily personal hygiene. The use of the shower is extended in Europe in the mid-19th century, as the effect of a series of social circumstances that may be noted by different hygiene and architecture treatises. Observing the vicissitudes that have been shaping the spaces and actions that define it, takes us to the strangeness that is object of our study. To do so we will take, from one side, the comments of Foucault about “the other spaces” and about the “society of control”, to define the other showers. On the other side we will observe that, in the beginning, the use of showers did not take part of everyday life, but on the contrary, it was inculcated through medical control and discipline in schools, hospitals, barracks and prisons. This reflexion, developed in the two case studies of the shower and the bath-shower, will let us wonder what systems of control may still be latent in our customs, precisely through the patterns that make up the ordinary.