Soot, Dirt, and Human Flesh Packed Together

For the first half of the nineteenth century, the banya remained popular with the people, but was generally ignored by medical professionals in Russia. Ironically, in Western Europe, doctors began to explore the potential of steam bathing for treating ailments and improving health. In the West, public bathhouses were new and could be considered modern. In Russia they had always existed and were considered traditional. In 1812 a popular broadside depicted Napoleon suffering in the Russian banya. In his fiction, the author Fyodor Dostoevsky used the banya as a place of ambiguity: it was clean and dirty, pure and corrupt, a potential gateway to hell and salvation.