Gardy-Loo!

CLEAN AND DECENT (281 pp.)--Lawrence Wright--Viking ($4.95).

King John, signer (under duress) of Magna Carta, bathed once every three weeks. Queen Elizabeth, born 317 years after his death, scrubbed herself only once a month, "whether she needed it or no." Thus it may be seen that the history of the human race's sanitary habits is by no means an unchecked upward gush. British Expert Wright--an architect, not a plumber--charts the flow with scholarship, wit, and handsome illustrations ; the resulting volume is better bathtub reading than most recent novels.

It is the Americans, of course, who are accused of being obsessed with cleanliness and of trying to convert the world to the glory of the bathroom. But the Romans were far greater bathers. The author observes that the Baths of Caracalla covered an area six times greater than that of St.

Paul's Cathedral. Whereas modern London provides 51 gallons of water a day for each citizen, and New York City about 154, ancient Rome at its peak pumped 300 gallons for each unwashed head.There may be a lesson here for some Toynbee of indoor plumbing--if only that, when Rome fell, it was with a splash.

Dolphin Rampant. When the Roman legions sailed from Britain, the barbarians who took over had no use for the spacious bathhouses. For centuries Europe remained very nearly dedicated to the proposition that dirtiness is next to godliness. One medieval writer complained about the effeminacy of the Danes, who "used to comb their hair every day, bathed every Saturday and used many other such frivolous means of setting off the beauty of their persons." As late as the 18th century, when residents of Edinburgh threw slops from fifth-floor bedchambers with the cry "Gardy-loo!" (from the French gardez I'eau, or watch out for the water), Europe's sanitary arrangements consisted of ordure without decorum. The first British patent for a water closet was not taken out until 1775, although da Vinci had designed one nearly three centuries earlier.

Eventually, the apparatus was available in the form of a dolphin (rampant), a lion (couchant), or embellished with the "blue magnolia design." ^ In 1900 the Syphonic Closet of the Century was announced. It was clean and decent, but it missed the pungent grandeur of the commode from which Louis XIV announced his forthcoming marriage to Mme. de Maintenon. And it cannot have given its users the satisfaction of the chamber pot, or jerry, available to Britons around 1800, whose interior was limned with a portrait of Napoleon.

Dipping Sitz. As for the bathtub, one of the more notable types was the slipper or boot bath, the comfortable contraption in which Marat was assassinated by Charlotte Corday. In the 19th century, one bathed according to the nature of his ailments. A sitz, or semicuphim, bath was recommended for congestion of the brain, and a "dipping sitz," did wonders for "nervous debility and a relaxed condition of the generative parts." An overheated brain could be cooled by a foot bath, but bathers were warned to keep their toes in motion.

Author Wright praises the modern bath for its ubiquity and abundant hot water, but decries the Babbitt's delight offered in a "choice of seventy-two colours, of which pink is available in twenty-two shades." Even more lamentable is the decline of public baths, such as those at Bath, Somersetshire (founded, legend has it, by King Lear's father, Prince Bladud).

For, as a bard named Anstey rhapsodized in the Bath Poetical Guide, Oh! 'twas a glorious sight to behold the fair sex All wading with gentlemen up to their necks, And view them so prettily tumble and sprawl In a big smoking kettle as big as our hall.

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