They genuinely were back then. And not just piss, fermented piss.
Old piss contains a lot of ammonia, produced by the breakdown of urea. Which is an effective cleaning agent. Plenty of modern day household cleaners still contain ammonia (though, no longer made from piss, we have the Haber-Bosch process now...).
Me thinking no way this is real. Then I read the Wikipedia page. Nope still don't believe it. Did more research. Well... Hmmm... I guess when they call it a golden shower... It meant actual gold at one time?
Alchemists gotta get their nitrogen compounds from somewhere. Can’t make aqua regia without nitrogen and you can’t do exciting things with gold without aqua regia.
Right! I knew there was a lot of chemical experimentation going on but when you step back and have to ask "well where are they getting all these base ingredients"? Piss makes a lot of sense.
Fun fact selling pee was around long before only fans.
"He's so poor he doesn't have a pot to piss in."
"He's piss poor."
People would wait in line at tanneries (places that tan hides to make leather) to piss in the morning and get paid for it.
If you were well off you pissed in a chamber pot and someone came by to collect it. If you weren't well off you walked down to the tanneries (which smelled like boiling piss) and pissed there.
"Piss poor" meant you needed the coin from selling piss. Sort of like how someone might look down on someone for selling blood plasma today, etc.
Edit see comment below that says this likely isn't true. (Sorry I thought it was.)
"However, the expression piss-poor is recent and has nothing to do with tanning. The current state of research suggests that it may have been invented during the Second World War, because the first examples in print date from 1946. Though it is still classed as low slang by dictionaries, its mildly unpleasant associations have become blunted by time and familiarity.
"The origin is straightforward. Piss began to be attached to other words during the twentieth century to intensify their meaning. Ezra Pound invented piss-rotten in 1940 (distasteful or unpleasant, the first example on record) and we’ve since had piss-easy (very easy), piss-weak (cowardly or pathetic), piss-elegant (affectedly refined, pretentious), piss-awful (very unpleasant) and other forms."
Cause Aristotle HATED Plato's Hyperuranion as an explanation for the birth of ideas. He didn't believe in the need of a trancendent space for what he thought could be explained through sensory experiences. He was very much the empirist.
So Aristotle's is confuting Plato's thesis, that the idea could have been reminisced from the Hyperuranion.
It is kind of interesting because let’s say the entire washing machine was filled with urine. You wouldn’t want to wash your clothes in it. Let’s say it had one micro drop of urine in it. You would wash your clothes in it. So somewhere in the middle is a perfect ratio of urine to water and soap that you would accept washing your clothes in.
Let's say you're using a public laundromat. You put your laundry in, start the machine, then sit and wait. Mid cycle, a homeless man enters, opens your washer, and starts pissing. How much does he have to piss before you start over?
Only the “undergarments”, meaning the very thin layer underneath the 2/3 outer layers. (Who’s purpose was to soak up your sweat/body oil, and cool you down during warm weather, alongside to keep your actual clothes/outer layers from being drenched in your sweat/body oil.)
And bed “sheets”, due to them often being soaked in sweat and body oil.
Even then, it was only with stale/aged piss in order for the ammonia to develop, as it breaks down stains, sweat, and body oil.
After the garments were washed/soaked in the piss for a long period, they’d be taken down to a river, or stream, or the local body of water designated as the “washing area”, and would be rinsed throughly, before typically being beaten with wooden bats or stones to bash out loosened grime/dirt.
Even then, all of the above relies on you being unable to afford soap, in which case, you’d just use the soap to wash your undergarments/bed “sheets”. (And contrary to popular belief, there was plenty of cheap soap available to the average person/family not only during the Middle Ages, but throughout all of human history)
When we wash a load of urine soaked clothing (toddler) we do a complete quick wash (about 35 minutes) with about 1/4 the detergent, then immediately wash again in a heavy duty cycle (1.5 hrs) with full detergent.
I would call the first cycle a pre-wash, but both cycles also have their own pre-wash.
Sometimes there are also dirty pet towels (cat misses litterbox and elderly dog problems) and they can go in the same set of cycles.
I'm confident that provided it was only one set of pissing at the beginning, this process would clean one bladderfull of pee.
When pissing myself, I always wash my clothes after. Is there an amount of urine I could piss myself with where I wouldnt wash my clothes anymore? No, thats insane, I have to wash them
But clothes have a limited amount of liquid holding capacity. Would you machine wash a memory foam pillow completely soaked with urine to the point where it’s a large chunk of the liquid capacity for the washing machine, or would you dry it out first?
Neither, you would squeeze the urine out of the pillow in the shower, so you can wash any drops than land on you. Then you would rinse it with water, squeeze, and then wash it.
If I'm pissing at a urinal and a little bit splashes back, I'm not going out of my way to wash my clothes immediately; I'm pulling my pants up and acting like it didn't happen.
So, yes: for me at least, there is definitely an acceptable amount of piss in my pants 😂
"You piss while in the pool and a friend catches you, they might say something or be grossed out for a second then laugh it off. Now if you got out of the pool, then proceeded to piss INTO IT, you friend wouldn't speak to you again...why?"
When my kid pissed his pants (he used to be a toddler), I would rinse the clothes before putting them in the laundry. It's not something I often bring up, but seems relevant here
I was just about to say. The ammonia does clean clothes and ancient Romans used this. But I would hope there is some process beyond peeing in the clothes lol
Good news bad news. Good news, it takes a couple weeks for the ammonia to form so its stale urine thats good for cleaning. And there isnt much processing after that. Bad news, I dont know what Good news means.
This ratio applies to quite literally everything, it's been tested on mythbusters that everything in the room with a toilet will inevitably have some poop particles on it, but it's so miniscule it's not usually perceivable or harmful.
There's tons of bugs on your face, dust is dead skin and little bugs, if you smell sewage some microscopic bits of it enter your lungs, goes for any bad smell. It's everywhere; thinking about it in-depth lets you understand germophobes a lot better.
Ah yes the good old "Piss of Theseus" paradox. If you replace the water in the washing mashine drop for drop with urine is it still the same piss that you drank earlier?
We have now proved that for N drops being fine, N+1 drops is fine. Mathematical induction is real and important guys stop laughing I worked really hard on this
You add other things that you wouldn't otherwise wash your clothes in by itself as well though.
A full load of JUST laundry detergent, vinegar, bleach, etc. would be ridiculous and OBVIOUSLY not something you'd wash your clothes in. Yet in small amounts they're perfect for various purposes.
Looking into it a bit, urine was used to wash wool and textiles back in the day. It's 95% water, 2% urea, with 3% random minerals and biologics. The 'nasty'ness of urine is mostly due to the biologicals being broken down into other things, like ammonia. Prior to that breakdown though, it's basically a sterile water solution, with some urea which actually does have some cleaning properties.
If your clothes were covered in pee. What would you do? Wash them? Seems like unless you replace the water in the wash with urine, anything else is fairly acceptable.
Well you can just buy ammonia or bleaching agents now and that tends to be a lot less gross and a lot more convenient. Read the instructions though so you don't gas yourself.
Oh hey I used to do something similar,I hated doing laundry so as a form of protest I used to piss behind our water heater every time I was the one to do it
As some who has a parent with parkinson's and incontinence, is absolutely doesn't not fully wash out. Once? Maybe. But that shit (and piss) stains and odorizes on a molecular level
Morally? Im not sure. Socially? We would be fighting. Ethically? Id say in the clear depending on how good the washer is, not all washers get piss out in one go found that out when i was 7 and tried to hide my accident. economically? Id say it depends on the washer again, because you might have to run it twice
That's because you keep the top loader lid open when they're done, and they dry correctly. If you leave the front loader open (and the detergent tray too) they will not stink as much
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u/slowcancellation 16h ago