The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized HistoryThe 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. |
Contents
But Didnt They Smell? | 1 |
The Social Bath Greeks and Romans | 15 |
Bathed in Christ 2001000 | 49 |
A Steamy Interlude 10001550 | 73 |
A Passion for Clean Linen 15501750 | 97 |
The Return of Water 17501815 | 125 |
Baths and How to Take Them Europe 18151900 | 161 |
Wet All Over at Once America 18151900 | 199 |
Soap Opera 19001950 | 229 |
The Household Shrine 1950 to the Present | 263 |
Acknowledgments | 299 |
Notes | 301 |
| 329 | |
| 335 | |
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