Did you bathe today? If you live in western Europe, the U.S., Canada, or any of the world’s other post-industrial countries, there’s an excellent chance you did. And if you didn’t, you almost certainly did yesterday. You also likely washed your clothes within the past week. A century ago, none of these things would have been so easily assumed. Three centuries ago, the odds would strongly favor a negative answer to these questions (Louis XIV of France, for example, took two baths over the entire course of his life). So what changed?
In his new The Clean Body; A Modern History, Prof. Peter Ward examines the changes to personal hygiene in the west, how they began, spread throughout populations, and what effects they produced.
For those who might wonder how, and even if, a book on the history of personal hygiene classifies as natural history, I would refer to the many recent reports that those of us who live in, and follow the common hygiene practices of, modern post-industrial nations may in fact now be trying to make ourselves “too clean,” with subsequent consequences to our individual and collective immunity, as well as the related impacts upon the environment the substances we use to do so may be having. Such questions most certainly deserve thought, and this new book appears to be a very good place indeed in which to begin.
