Author: Susanna Forrest / Source: Atlas Obscura
The old German font was hard to decipher, so I sent the newspaper article to a professor who spends half his life immersed in the gothic script. “This is from 1848,” I wrote.
“Does it really say what I think it says?”I was researching the 19th-century European vogue for eating horsemeat, a movement spread across the continent by “hippophagic societies” whose members believed that broken-down workhorses should be fed to the growing proletariat. I was used to accounts of scientists and do-gooders tucking into “Pegasus filet” and fine wines, but this was something else. “It is what you think it is,” the professor wrote back. “They’re bathing children in horse broth.”
According to “the informed opinion of an experienced physician,” the brief news item from Berlin recounted, horse bouillon bathing had proved itself in medical applications, especially in pediatrics. It wouldn’t be just the wealthy who could indulge, the article went on, implying that baths of broth would be affordable for the lower classes, too.
In 1848, German enthusiasm for horsemeat was still new, but the dark red flesh already had a reputation as a health food. The chemist Justus von Liebig claimed that horse contained more creatine for muscle building than beef or mutton, and the new horse-butchering establishments were well-regulated and clean. But even if horsemeat was cheap, why bathe in a tub filled with bouillon?
It turns out that Europeans have a long history of steeping themselves in meat soup, although I found that references were scattered and scant. Vats of horse broth played a role in pagan Indo-European rites across Europe and Asia in which the equine was sacrificed, dismembered, and boiled. This may have inspired the first mention I found of a broth bath, dating from the late 12th century. Gerald of Wales, clerk and chaplain to King Henry II of England, was dispatched to Ireland to report on the locals. Gerald portrayed them as godless brutes in an account now viewed as unreliable, anti-Irish propaganda. He described the new king of an Ulster tribe bathing in broth made from a sacrificed white mare with which he had just had intercourse. The king sipped on the broth as he soaked. Several modern scholars have pointed out the similarities between this (probably) imaginary rite and the ancient Indian Vedic horse sacrifice known as the Ashvamedha. Although in that case, the queen symbolically sleeps with the horse, and no one bathes in the broth.
Less luridly, broth bathing appears to share a tandem history with “hydrotherapy,” the therapeutic immersion of the body in warm mineral water….
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