I read that the Babylonians concocted this. Other research  tells of the Kelts (Celts - whoever let's not get sidetracted down that route for a tad) tribals in Europe who made a slimy mess from animal fat and fire ash they called 'sap'..... is that possible? This was carried about in leather pouches. I suppose it was used when they felt grubby.

More modern stuff is hard to find at the moment,,, about 6 weeks ago I bought Wrights Coal tar which I have not used for over 50 years; my instinct being ever true and dependable.
In the East one can still get LIfebuoy. My mother asked for it as according to her it was great for deep washing clothes. Sadly I gave the last of her hoard to a builder who seemed to be in need of a deep clean.
These have a fresh smell - unlike the stuff with daft names gifted by family that make me feel like an overdressed ice lolly or candy bar.
So let's here it for Soap and the History thereof with the full Res Hist treatment.

Wood ash is a source of lye - potassium hydroxide. Boiling that with animal fat is the classic recipe for - SOAP!

One wonders how they discovered the cleansing powers of that..... if I mixed wood ash with animal fat I would just get a bloody awful mess. I know it! (I do not lie.) (Oh dear - only 11 weeks to go.)

Priscilla wrote:

More modern stuff is hard to find at the moment ... about 6 weeks ago I bought Wrights Coal tar which I have not used for over 50 years...

.... this was originally a pen & ink cartoon in the magazine Punch in 1884 (with no brand name) but it was then adopted by Pears Soap as the full colour advert above.

Probably accidental - have used ash or sand to scour mess tins etc when camping. Boil it up in a greasy cauldron or similar and get bubbles! Congratulations! Beware, if boiling up your socks, because a bar of Sunlight soap came down and soap suds flew around (to the consternation of certain shepherds who were watching their flocks at the time)

My mother boiled my sock once - but we only got peas pudding - and a spare sock.

I bet he wished he'd never appeared in the Pears soap ad!
Admiral Sir William James, known throughout the Royal Navy as "bubbles".
Bet he cursed his granddad (Millais) for it. Probably Christopher Robin Milne would have sympathised!

You don't necessarily need animal fat to make soap, vegetable oils also work very well, for example olive oil is used to make 'savon de Marseille'. Soap had been made industrially in Marseille since at least the 14th century but Louis XIV's Edict of Colbert in 1688 limited the name 'savon de Marseille' exclusively to olive oil based soaps. Soap made with olive oil is generally milder than those based on animal fats and so it was popular for toilet soaps as well as for cleaning delicate fabrics like silk and lace, until mass-produced synthetic soaps and liquid detergents appeared towards the end of the 19th century.

Priscilla,

our teacher of chemistry told us that during WWII in Ostend, as he had caustic soda from a chemical factory in Ostend, he mixed it with butter. Although butter in those times costed a fortune, good soap costed even a bigger fortune. 

And yes as you see it, it can be a valuable formula.
https://www.almostoffgrid.co.uk/easy-soap-recipe-olive-oil-soap-shea-butter/

I had to look for what sheabutter was...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shea_butter

Kind regards from Paul.

I remember "super-fatted" being used to describe posh soap. It was something that mystified me as a little girl, as soap never seemed to me to be "fat".

This thread got me thinking about the origin of the expression: "Cleanliness is next to godliness". I have always assumed that this was a saying from the Bible, but no - it is just a proverb, and a very old one. Apparently it has been found in a Babylonian ancient text. Not sure if this is true or not!

Before the late 1800s, cleanliness referred to spiritual purity only, but, around 1870, American Protestant capitalists had an "Aha!" moment (like they do) - they realised the Good Lord could help sell soap - and make them a fortune! Good old God! Fifty years later, soap came second only to food production and sales. Soap had become a Protestant multi-million dollar business.

Repent - and Be Laved!

I love the idea of "The Facial Purity League" (mentioned in the article): we may all, in these dark times, be as meticulous and obsessive in our ablutions as a sneezing Lady Macbeth ("Out, damn virus!), but how many of us can honestly claim that we have "pure" faces? How do you know if your face passes the "purity" test? My face is clean, but is it pure?

I also like the Ivory Soap advert shown in the link (name is a biblical reference - Psalm 45 - and so helped to make the production company millions of dollars), but am mystified by the claim that the product is 99.44% pure. What were the .56% impurities lurking in each bar?



“As it is with godliness, so with cleanliness, there are many millions without the desire to repent and be laved...We must continue to ‘sell’ the world on cleanliness.”

From the 1960s

I never worked out which came first Port Sunlight or sunlight soap..... which you can still buy in the East - up until this week, anyway.

A few years back I went with a friend who was making a large donation to a really good charity and found hardly anyone at home in their large building. Everyone - all the staff high and low were out in schools  all over the city from  posh private schools to slum schools for Hand Washing Day along with heaps of little Sunlight soap tablets... an event we knew nothing about. These aware people did. This charity is headed and run by active top business  people doctors and teachers holding down big jobs. Everyone to do with it  is a volunteer except the cleaners and guards.
They do great things in awful places.

Anyone remember soap flakes - specially made to matt up your jumper, I reckon. And there was something I never understood, saddle soap. I can make a good guess as to why saddles might need soaping but was it real soap?

There's a legal chambers in Dublin called "Sunlight Chambers", as it was once the Dublin office of the soap company. It occupies a corner site, so on two sides has a ribbon relief showing all the historical and industrial aspects to making soap and using it. I've always loved it - from when it was first pointed out to me by my mother when still a toddler. It has escaped destruction by the skin of its teeth on more than one occasion, and is currently on a preservation list.

I thought saddle soap is not so much to clean the leather as to condition it: to preserve it and keep it soft and flexible, like using lanolin or beeswax on a leather chair or sofa etc. In a chemical sense many lubricating greases are strictly soaps or at least contain soaps as a major constituent, similarly soaps are often added to lubricating oils to increase their viscosity, to make them less runny but no less slippery.

That's fantastic - it would be criminal to destroy it.


I remember Lux soap flakes, although we always used Stergene for our woollies. It was a liquid (like Woolite which I still use), so was easier to dissolve in tepid water.


Lux toilet soap was the soap used by film stars - or so we were told. Was it nine out of ten film stars used it - or was that nine out of ten cats prefered KitiKat? The daft adverts from the 60s seem a long way away now and I get muddled trying to remember their various outrageous claims - for soap or anything else. Camay offered a "schoolgirl complexion", if I remember correctly. I was a schoolgirl at the time, so was pretty unimpressed.

Crossed post - meant the building in Dublin is fantastic!

Port Sunlight was built to house the workers from Lever's soap factory, so presumably the soap came first. Soap flakes - you used to have to make your own by shaving them off a bar of hard soap (iirc about 1 ft / 30 cm long), either red or green (green was Fairy I think). You also cut pieces off the block for use as soap. Last time I saw this was as "Pusser's hard" - RN soap. It was said there was nothing you couldn't clean with Pusser's Hard, Pusser's Paste, or Bluebell (the last was similar to Brasso) and elbow grease.

Temperance wrote:

I remember Lux soap flakes, although we always used Stergene for our woollies. It was a liquid (like Woolite which I still use), so was easier to dissolve in tepid water.

Temperance, I am brought  up with Sunlight Soap 



and for the washing in an old wooden washtub with motor as something like this one:



my mother used always only one kind of washpowder: "Soleil"




And have even 8 years old made soapflakes with a knife from Sunlight soap blocs and one had to stirr the water from time to time to let solve the flakes...

Kind regards from Paul.

Nord, the Dublin Soap fresco is as good as the Elgin marbles..... surprising we never brought it home here for looking after. Love it.

Gosh - shaving soap bars. We had Lux flakes sin posh navy boxes that ruined woollens just as well but with more dignity.

Soaps were called soaps because many of the early "soap operas" -  radio programmes which became hugely popular in the 1930s - were sponsored by the big detergent companies, notably Proctor and Gamble. Adverts broadcast during commercial breaks concentrated on the cleaning power of the various soap and laundry products manufactured by the likes of P&G. The audiences in the early days of soaps were made up, in the main, of housewives. The various companies' marketing strategies played on wifely neuroses: being a good wife back then meant your towels etc. had to be "whiter than white". Greying net curtains - displayed for all the world to see - were the ultimate disgrace, and meant you were a total failure as a woman and a human being.

I bought a big bottle of Dettol Laundry Cleanser during my last panicky Big Shop (God - that seems weeks ago now), fooled by the promise that it "kills 99.9% of bacteria even at 20 degrees". The label also reassured me that my laundry would be "hygienically clean every time, whatever the temperature you wash at." It was a very expensive product - £7.50 - and I suspect I've been conned - probably a bit of cheap disinfectant in the rinse cycle would be just as effective, although viruses are hardy little beasts:  I believe no product can claim to destroy them. Bacteria, on the other hand, for some reason seem easier to zapp. Why is that? Drying stuff on the line in the sunshine is probably far more effective - and free.

Everything does smell nice, though. My laundry cleanser was made in Slough - what a coincidence!

A cycle in a tumble dryer will kill most viruses. It's getting them to the dryer that's the risky bit ...

Priscilla wrote:

Gosh - shaving soap bars.

I still use this system for eliminating daily growth;

nordmann wrote:

A cycle in a tumble dryer will kill most viruses. It's getting them to the dryer that's the risky bit ...

I hadn't thought of that - "D'oh!"

PS Haven't got a tumbler dryer, but just handling dirty laundry in the first place is dodgy, I suppose. Bugs last for about 72 hours...All mine should be dead by now (she said hopefully)...

And a hot iron should sizzle the little pests into oblivion.

It's the handling of things that's often the tricky part. Yesterday I had the neighbour here while he used my internet access and we coordinated strategies etc. He then went off to do his weekly shopping and later returned wearing surgical gloves that he had presumably put on before entering the store. But was still wearing them and continued to do so even when I pointed them out. But in this situation gloves don't operate like armour. Everything he touched with them on would be exactly like if he wore no gloves at all, so if there was any contamination on them he would simply transfer it to his car steering wheel, to his PC when he picked that up, to himself when, almost inevitably, he touched his face with his gloved hands. Gloves can almost encourage complacency.

I used to work with cyanide and so obviously always wore surgical gloves when doing so, but you have to be very strict in never touching youself, your clothes or indeed anything with them than isn't part of the 'contaminated' work area (and that even includes simply things like the pen you write the results with etc). And of course you always take them off, and dispose of them correctly, before moving on to another task. You learn to be disciplined but even so it is hard to do so, even when the risk of contamination is essentially limited to very specific tasks confined to a restricted area that is known  (not just suspect) as dangerously contaminated. And of course cyanide poisoning is rather different to a biohazard as the effect is almost immediate although there was always an antidote (although not a very effective one) close at hand. But even with gloves I used to get almost obssessed about washing my hands with good old soap and water.

Of course give children woollen gloves in hope that it makes the picking of noses less likely. Our newspaper being delivered by a lad - with gloves does not inspire confidence. We spray the paper which now smells of some daft concoction of synthetic spring - or something tropical.

Indeed, MM. The situation we find ourselves in is really exposing what up to only a few weeks ago were laughable levels of ignorance and silliness. The stakes are a little higher now ...

Temp, on fabric this virus has been measured to last a maximum of 8 hours. So definitely don't feel you should launch into a whole load of unnecessary ironing (a pleonasm in my book anyway).

Meanwhile back in the world of fatty acid salts, those selling soap products using the "whiter than white" approach have always steered into dangerous waters when getting their market strategies a little skewed. We can all laugh ruefully at this ham-fisted attempt at selling a brand of "ladies' soap" back in the 1880s ...



... until we remember that Dove showed this ad on UK TV as recently as 2017.

Liril. Launched with great todo, the late Steve Race was commissioned to produce a jingle. Execs lstened to the first version, and asked "Where are the trumpets?". Finally launched and swiftly withdrawn because it swiftly did a boojum and "softly and suddenly vanish away". THe name is still in use for Hindustan Unilver, but I doubt it is the same formulation.

Re schoolgirl complexions : had they never heard of acne? Particularly premenstual acne?

Re dubious ads, this one for wet shaving:

Remember George Melly singing this :

Now, George was well known for non-PC language, (see "All The Girls go crazy"  - the later part) but even he had to bowdlerise this!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkPCmIxv-3k

Ah the 1920s, the good old days when they played such clean and wholesome music, nothing like the vulgar, smutty lyrics of today.

Meles meles wrote:

It's the handling of things that's often the tricky part. Yesterday I had the neighbour here while he used my internet access and we coordinated strategies etc. He then went off to do his weekly shopping and later returned wearing surgical gloves that he had presumably put on before entering the store. But was still wearing them and continued to do so even when I pointed them out. But in this situation gloves don't operate like armour. Everything he touched with them on would be exactly like if he wore no gloves at all, so if there was any contamination on them he would simply transfer it to his car steering wheel, to his PC when he picked that up, to himself when, almost inevitably, he touched his face with his gloved hands. Gloves can almost encourage complacency.

Yes MM of course you are right. All outside material, which enters your house, can be contaminated. So the grandson (PHD human biochemicals) said the same to me. The gloves have to be put in the dust bin as soon as you enter. The "retour" money that I received (in a plastic envelope) from the supply of food and drinks at home, I let untouched for more than four days. As the food for one day... the precaution has to be perhaps for 72 hours...but it all ends somewhere...
I even cleansed my bank card that I had used with gloves to have some money and even that money some day untouched...

Kind regards from Paul.

A mouth soap wash used to be a useful threat against bad language in my day. I never heard of it used, the threat seemed enough. Some of the really bad words I did not hear  in my childhood anyway. Now they are so overworked they are more tiresome than offensive. Anyway, any parent threatening this now would have their children taken into care, a stint in court and probably jail.... oh the little dears.

Priscilla wrote:

A mouth soap wash used to be a useful threat against bad language in my day. I never heard of it used, the threat seemed enough. Some of the really bad words I did not hear  in my childhood anyway. Now they are so overworked they are more tiresome than offensive. Anyway, any parent threatening this now would have their children taken into care, a stint in court and probably jail.... oh the little dears.

 
Priscilla, it was also an expression in my time, but more as a kind of saying than a threat to someone...

"you would better wash your mouth, before you say such stupid things..."

With hindsight I see now, (if I am right?), something illogical...Hasn't it rather to be logically: after you said such stupid things...?
Or would the saying have been:
"you would better HAVE WASHED your mouth"?

Kind regards, Paul.

There are also the expressions using "soft soap" as meaning to try and persuade someone about something through the use of charm, flattery, or cajolery, as in, say "Don't let his soft soap get the better of you—he's only interested in himself." etc. I presume this was how Charles Darwin's opponent in the Oxford University evolution debate of 1860, bishop Samuel Wilberforce, got his nickname of "Soapy Sam". Wilberforce was a well known and popular orator, although Disraeli described his manner as "unctuous, oleaginous, saponaceous".

Meles meles wrote:

There are also the expressions using "soft soap" as meaning to try and persuade someone about something through the use of charm, flattery, or cajolery, as in, say "Don't let his soft soap get the better of you—he's only interested in himself." etc. I presume this was how Charles Darwin's opponent in the Oxford University evolution debate of 1860, bishop Samuel Wilberforce, got his nickname of "Soapy Sam". Wilberforce was a well known and popular orator, although Disraeli described his manner as "unctuous, oleaginous, saponaceous".

 
I like your narration about the famous Oxford University debate between Darwin and Wilberforce, MM.

That said, we have also that expression in our dialect and perhaps also in Dutch...

j'is weer bezig met er zeep aan te smeren (he is again busy with smearing? soap at it) They translate in "translate" with "he is back to smearing soap on it"

Kind regards from Paul.

"Soft soap" was the colloquial term used by curriers for the lubricant they used in the final part of the tanning process to render leather pliable. In most of Europe linseed oil was normally mixed with soap, though other oils were also used, such as canola oil in Central Europe, birch oil in Russia and olive oil in Mediterranean lands, or even rendered animal fat when poorer people made do with ingredients to hand and tanned their hides themselves (not their own, of course). According to my OED its first recorded use to mean "softened up through flattery" was from a Commons debate in 1830, though it unfortunately does not give more context except that it was actually used as a noun. As a verb it wasn't recorded until 1845, and again coincidentally in an unspecified Hansard record.

"Soft soaping" leather ironically made it look dirtier rather than cleaner. The vigorous and multiple application of the compound tended to collect and ingrain loose dirt and dust. The currier therefore traditionally followed the soft soaping process with application of a dye to hide the blemishes caused by the lubrication.

tan me hide when I'm dead, Fred
Tan me hide when I'm dead
 So we tanned his hide when he died, Clyde
 And that's it hangin' on the shed!!

I may have misunderstood or not read thoroughly enough, but here in NZ we still use Sunlight Soap. Many years ago I read something saying washing your hair with soap was better than with shampoo, but you had to jelly the soap first, or it would just look dull so I did that for a number of years but now I just use soap, any sort of soap, and rinse it with vinegar, which at first bemuses my carers who shower me, but they soon get used to it. (We have cancelled my care for this week and probably longer - it puts pressure on my husband but we want as few people as possible coming into the house. Not that I worry much about Covid-19, but others in our little bubble of 6 do (my son, dil and their two children are staying with us at the moment, just having returned from England in time). But their jobs didn't last long.

Caro,

Sunlight soap is still used overhere too
https://www.drogisterij.net/huishoudelijk/schoonmaakmiddel/schoonmaakartikelen/allesreiniger/sunlight-huishoudzeep-4000125014315



" I just use soap, any sort of soap, and rinse it with vinegar, which at first bemuses my carers who shower me, "
It confuses me too...but what the heck would Temperance say...after all it is each ones own choice...and if it fits you...I always see consternation too, when I eat together with the potatoes: green beans with applesauce...they find this a bit "abnormal"...and then I say: I brought the recept over from East to West-Flanders. And I learned it from my mother...When I then also add some mustard in the mix , then "they" find that normal at it seems to be normal in both provinces...


Caro, yes you have to isolate your house and its inhabitants as well as possible, avoiding all foreign stuff from outside, even put the object, obliged to enter, in surveillance and looking if they can't be possible contaminated...


Kind regards, Paul.

Temperance would say she has been using a Lush "shampoo bar" for ages. They smell nice, make your hair all bouncy and are good for the environment. There are several sorts available - all sold out in the present panicky times, alas. 

Solid Shampoo Bars

Using ordinary soap for washing your hair is problematic in areas with hard water, which generates loads of scum. Actually salt water soap (potassium stearates rather than the common sodium ones) does not produce scum, so you can use that. It also (unsurprisingly) works in salty water, where the sodium version won't lather.
In my aquarist days (before my marriage) we used to trade water. Birmingham water (ppm 25 irc) was in demand for breeding and keeping many fish - particularly tetras & discus, both Amazon species) whilst our 175 ppm was better for most livebearers (guppies particularly, though mollies did like slightly brackish water, which killed most plants)

Green George wrote:

Using ordinary soap for washing your hair is problematic in areas with hard water, which generates loads of scum. Actually salt water soap (potassium stearates rather than the common sodium ones) does not produce scum, so you can use that. It also (unsurprisingly) works in salty water, where the sodium version won't lather.
In my aquarist days (before my marriage) we used to trade water. Birmingham water (ppm 25 irc) was in demand for breeding and keeping many fish - particularly tetras & discus, both Amazon species) whilst our 175 ppm was better for most livebearers (guppies particularly, though mollies did like slightly brackish water, which killed most plants)

Gil, yes, hard water and soap, but also the treatment of hard water for the industry and the household means a lot of trouble. For instance the household treatment prevents for lime deposits on valves and tubes, but is even more important for electrical or gas boilers. I have even a small electrical boiler for 40 years thanks to my treatment of the water. I had first an ion exchanger of 10 L with resin (water softener) that I handled by hand for the "regeneration". (I followed the water treatment in the factory where I worked and perhaps 40 years ago I was already used to the system). But even for handy wo(men) as I guess are overhere too...The automatic systems you have to buy and subscribe to a costly annual survey including the salt. I even don' t know if the hand system still exists overhere in Belgium. 
But see I think in Britain it still exists:
And a ten liter is enough for a household...



And your soap scum will be the past.
https://www.thespruce.com/soap-scum-information-1900291

In the factory we measured the hardness of water in French degrees, but you had also German degrees (conversion  of one French degree is 0.56 German degree.) And I see now that you have also English degrees...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_water 

PS:As I got a bit lazy over the years I stopped that montly handling and I bought an automic system with the costly follow up I mentioned.
PPS. to be honest,it was because my manual one was "kaputt" and I didn't find  a manual one on the market anymore...Overhere they say: "duivels zak is nooit vol" (devil's sack is never full)...

Kind regards, Paul.

We've never bothered with anything more sophisticated than washing soda. That is normally sold as crystals, which is an expensive way of buying water - since each molecule of Sodium Carbonate has 10 molecules of water of crystallisation. It slowly loses that by efflorescence, leaving a more or less anhydrous powder, so as you go down the packet you can use a little lessd each time. Apparently one company tried selling the anhydrous salt, but people perceived the crystalline form as "better vqalue".

Here is a US advertisement representing Admiral Georges Dewey in 1899:

Thank you Sylvain for mentioning this Kipling's "White Man's Burden "

https://www.gradesaver.com/rudyard-kipling-poems/study-guide/summary-the-white-mans-burden
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden

And it recalled me about former discussions on this board, especially with nordmann, about "colonialism" starting with "Tintin in Congo" from Georges Rémy (Hergé)
And adjacent to that I remembered a discussion with nordmann about "Social Darwinism", where I reffered to a discussion with him on the ex-BBC messageboard about Darwin a man of his time, and not so much differing from ideas of his time.

As all the links don't work anymore (last year the texts of the BBC board, not consultable anymore) I did again the whole reseach. I was busy till now.
I will start a new thread, or perhaps two: a new one on "Colonialism" and a new one about "Social Darwinism" as even a "Cor Hermans" seems not so "strict" anymore as some years ago...and as I read the original text of Chapter V that I used to convince nordmann on the BBC I start to be more moderate  against Darwin...
https://reshistorica.forumotion.com/t1037-darwin-and-social-darwinism

Kind regards, Paul.

Are there references to soap being used through the ages..... post Kelt usage? Scented water, yes but what of soap - or were people as grubby as we were told as children? And what of washing clothes?
Many in the subcontinent still beat the hell out of clothing to force water through - and of course wash boards lasted  right up until skiffle groups nicked them whether or not used with soap, I know not.

Soap was being made on an industrial scale in London from animal fats and lye by the 12th century. I expect a lot of this was for use in the wool and other trades but no doubt it could also be bought for domestic use. Soap could be manufactured at home from household 'waste' products (wood ash and animal fats) but it's a smelly, messy, nasty job (the alkali will leave the hands raw) and I can imagine many city dwellers preferred to buy in the soft, smelly, lumpy balls of rough soap from the specialist manufacturers. Industrial scale soap-making using olive oil started in Spain in the 9th century (introduced by the Arabs from the Levant) and this 'Castile soap' was preferred if you could afford it as it was milder, better smelling and easier to handle as it was made into hard bars. Similar soap manufacture using olive oil started in southern France and Italy around the 13th century.

So soap was widely available and was used but it seems more for cleaning fabrics, clothes and kitchen utensils rather than as a regular body scrub. Medieval books of manners stress the importance of every morning washing the hands and face, combing hair, bushing teeth etc, and washing hands was always done, often with great ceremony, before meals, especially because food was usually taken from a shared platter and eaten by hand. These ablutions however were usually just with water, possibly scented rosewater, but generally without the use of soap. Hair was often washed with water or vinegar in which rosemary or other herbs had been steeped (and remember hair only gets greasy in response to regular washing with detergents, if left alone and just brushed regularly it generally sorts itself out), but as well as mild degreasants like rosemary (readily obtainable from the kitchen garden), there were also stronger vegetable degreasants available. Soapwort for example is a common wild plant, native to most of Europe, which was regularly grown in household gardens and whose leaves, if bruised and soaked in water, make an effective liquid soap.

Samuel Pepys mentions another use of soap when for 12 February 1662/3 he wrote:

Then came an old man from Mr. Povy, to give me some advice about his experience in the stone, which I [am] beholden to him for, and was well pleased with it, his chief remedy being Castle [Castile] soap in a posset.
Then in the evening to the office, late writing letters and my Journall since Saturday, and so home to supper and to bed.

So he drank some shavings of soap in his night-time posset (milk curdled with wine or ale) as a medicine to aid his gallstones.

Thank you MM for this history of soap.

MM wrote:
"and remember hair only gets greasy in response to regular washing with detergents, if left along and just brushed regularly it generally sorts itself out"

That is an argument that I will use in response to the partner's nearly each four days request to wash my hair...being alone and master of oneself has its advantages...but I have to agree also "some" disadvantages...

And one learns here everyday on RH: a Samuel Pepys drinking Castle soap snippets in his milk for gallstones (I suppose: "galstenen")...and washing the hair with "soapwort"?
https://www.thespruce.com/herb-soapwort-4107277

Kind regards from Paul.