For the Finns, the sauna has been a sacred place for curing the body and the soul. In the 19th century, the sauna was the only hygienic place and it was used also for giving birth and other medical care. Before the modern notion of hygiene, up until the 1900´s, the death rate of newborn babies was much lower in the Finnish countryside than in towns where family saunas were less common. A sauna is clean and as there were only the midwife and the mother present, communicable diseases were less likely affect the newborn.