The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History |
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The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History
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by Katherine Ashenburg
Sales Rank: 53736
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List Price: $24.00
$16.32
At Amazon
on 6-20-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 368 pages
Published by: North Point Press November 13, 2007
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 086547690X
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0865476905
Book Dimensions:
9.1 x 5.9 x 1.6 inches
Weighs: 1.3 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
According to Ashenburg (The Mourner's Dance), the Western notion of cleanliness is a complex cultural creation that is constantly evolving, from Homer's well-washed Odysseus, who bathes before and after each of his colorful journeys, to Shaw's Eliza Doolittle, who screams in terror during her first hot bath. The ancient Romans considered cleanliness a social virtue, and Jews practiced ritual purity laws involving immersion in water. Abandoning Jewish practice, early Christians viewed bathing as a form of hedonism; they embraced saints like Godric, who, to mortify the flesh, walked from England to Jerusalem without washing or changing his clothes. Yet the Crusaders imported communal Turkish baths to medieval Europe. From the 14th to 18th centuries, kings and peasants shunned water because they thought it spread bubonic plague, and Louis XIV cleaned up by donning a fresh linen shirt. Americans, writes Ashenburg, were as filthy as their European cousins before the Civil War, but the Union's success in controlling disease through hygiene convinced its citizens that cleanliness was progressive and patriotic. Brimming with lively anecdotes, this well-researched, smartly paced and endearing history of Western cleanliness holds a welcome mirror up to our intimate selves, revealing deep-seated desires and fears spanning 2000-plus years. 82 black and white illus. (Nov. 15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Description
The question of cleanliness is one every age and culture has answered with confidence. For the first-century Roman, being clean meant a two-hour soak in baths of various temperatures, scraping the body with a miniature rake, and a final application of oil. For the aristocratic Frenchman in the seventeenth century, it meant changing your shirt once a day and perhaps going so far as to dip your hands in some water. Did Napoleon know something we didn’t when he wrote Josephine “I will return in five days. Stop washing”? And why is the German term Warmduscher—a man who washes in warm or hot water—invariably a slight
against his masculinity? Katherine Ashenburg takes on such fascinating questions as these in Clean, her charming tour of attitudes to hygiene through time.
What could be more routine than taking up soap and water and washing yourself? And yet cleanliness, or the lack of it, is intimately connected to ideas as large as spirituality and sexuality, and historical events that include plagues, the Civil War, and the discovery of germs. An engrossing fusion of erudition and anecdote, Clean considers the bizarre prescriptions of history’sdoctors, the hygienic peccadilloes of great authors, and the historic twists and turns that have brought us to a place Ashenburg considers hedonistic yet oversanitized.
Reader Reviews
Do you smell bad? If you are reading this, it's a sure thing that you are a resident of the 21st century, and it's probable that you also are a resident of a society that reinforces regular bathing and use of deodorizers, so the answer is probably no. But then, if you were living five hundred years ago, the answer would probably be no, too, although if we were somehow to time-machine someone from that time to our own, we would probably answer yes in his particular instance. Katherine Ashenburg says that cleanliness is relative, or in her words "clean is a moving target", in her surprising history of attitudes toward dirt and grooming, _The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History_ (North Point Press). In her introduction, she writes, "Even more than in the eye or the nose, cleanliness is in the mind of the beholder. Every culture defines it for itself, choosing what it sees as the perfect point between squalid and over-fastidious." She makes the point by citing cigarette smoke; only a few decades ago, airplanes and restaurants were full of it, and most people, even nonsmokers, hardly noticed, let alone complained. Now we pick up on the smell immediately and take offense. "The nose is adaptable and teachable," Ashenburg writes, and she backs up the assertion with plenty of historical evidence. Her book gives a peculiar social history, one not covered in most history books. It is wonderfully entertaining, even though much of it is uncomfortable reading, first because those other people were so much dirtier than ourselves and they didn't seem to mind it, and second because we have been sold by advertising on a hypercleanliness that is beyond anything that health or social fitness demands. The Romans didn't use soap, though they liked soaking in public baths. The cleaning got done by oiling themselves up and using a special metal tool called a strigil to scrape off the oil and dirt. Social bathing was not something that fit into a Christian world view. "Many early saints embraced filth enthusiastically and ingeniously," says Ashenburg. The head of a convent in the fourth century warned her nuns, "A clean body and a clean dress mean an unclean soul." The Spanish Inquisition knew it was on the right track if an accused was "known to bathe," and Spanish confessors would not absolve those who washed regularly. There was an eventual turnaround for cities in which visitors could take the waters. Going to a spa was medical therapy, but eventually bathing was once again for getting clean. Advice books told people how to take baths for the best effect. It was nineteenth century America that took the lead in promoting personal hygiene. Ashenburg cites several reasons why this might be so, including having more room for bathrooms and the cleaning lessons of soldiers in the Civil War. Eventually, mild soaps from vegetable sources (like palm and olive oil to make Palmolive, get it?) insinuated themselves into homes by means of advertising, a commercial endeavor about which Americans have always been enthusiastic. The advertisers, however, were adept at creating and exploiting fears, subtly helping people to think "Everyone would like me more if I didn't smell bad." "Halitosis" was barely a medical term before Listerine let people know that their bad breath was keeping them from happy marriages and fine paychecks. Other firms harnessed women's fears to make a market for vaginal cleaners. Tooth whitening is now big business, even though dentists say the whiteners damage teeth and gums and anyway bright white is not the way healthy teeth naturally look. Our current level of fussing over bodily cleanliness does little for our mental security or our general health. Ashenburg notes at the end of the book that we have come full circle, for modern science from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has anointed simple handwashing as "the single most important means of preventing the spread of infection." Homeric heroes and medieval knights didn't have the science, but they knew that handwashing was a good practice. However, there is little basis for our jumping in with germicidal soaps, which are another aspect of our overcleaning mania. There are serious scientific proposals that cleaning up too much may mean that our immune systems don't get enough exercise to do their job efficiently. _The Dirt on Clean_, with plenty of humor, quotations from centuries of scrubbing or lack thereof, and many illustrations, shows that humans continue to bumble their way into hygiene, whatever the fashionable definition of that might turn out to be.
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The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History
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