The wordy article boils down to: the baths were infested by bacteria and worms due to insufficient water cleaning. Interesting, but could be compressed to 2-3 paragraphs without losing any detail.
Some other interesting things from the article that stuck with me:
- Most toilets weren't connected to the sewers because they didn't want to have the smell of the sewers in their houses
- The public latrines were considered a bad choice because of lack of privacy and shared spunges (based on texts on the walls)
- The sewers were built mainly for the convenience of not having to transport water to and from within the city, not necessarily for hygiene reasons
- Apparently some emperor did realize that it wasn't smart to bathe with sick and healthy people at the same time but decided the sick would bathe before the healthy
Of course, if you only wanted to know if they cleaned the water in bath houses sufficiently, then your summary suffices as well.
> Apparently some emperor did realize that it wasn't smart to bathe with sick and healthy people at the same time but decided the sick would bathe before the healthy
Maybe he thought they were more in need of cleansing.
Even with today's knowledge, without application of today's tech (overnight chlorination say) it wouldn't really make a difference? Today's first bathing session comes after yesterday's second.
Thanks for posting though.