See-Sawing Trends on Cleanliness Throughout History

books:


	• The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History Katherine Ashenburg North Point Press, 2007 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

hygiene history

An excellent history on human behavior related to hygiene over the centuries. Very well written, plenty of references.

See-Sawing Trends on Cleanliness Throughout History

In this book, the author discusses the varying views that people have had through the ages on the subject of the cleanliness of the human body. Spanning the period from ancient Greek times to the twenty-first century, the book contains details on the varying extents to which people sought (or desperately avoided) bodily cleanliness; the associated reasons for the many shifts in perspective are also presented. There is much fascinating information presented here and in great detail. On the down side, there may be too many details for the casual reader, and some of the detailed descriptions are (or seem to be) repetitive. Unfortunately, this tends to nudge some passages towards the boring side. The writing style is clear, friendly and accessible, although it seems to lack that certain spark that would make the book difficult to put down. But despite these minor drawbacks, this book certainly does contain a lot of fascinating information that should be of interest to anyone. However, I suspect that history buffs would likely relish this book the most.

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Interesting history of hygiene

Quite an interesting history of Western ideas of hygiene from the Roman Empire through the present day. I was a bit surprised that the book focused primarily on Europe, with a short description of the US in the late 19th and 20th centuries. There was no mention of other cultures/regions of the world.

Well researched and enjoyable reading

This book was an easy read. This is not to say that it wasn't informative or well researched. It just wasn't dry reading, as many historical books can be. It made me very glad that I was not alive during the middle ages. The author states very clearly how attitudes and habits on cleanliness have changed in the past several thousand years.

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Big flaw with this book

The book is entertaining and informative. The big flaw is that it is anti American. Instead of seeing the American way of one way among other ways of approaching cleanliness, with faults and virtues both, the author takes the politically correct viewpoint, that we are bad, bad, bad and our ways are wrong, wrong, wrong. Europeans, she likes. Well, we are the products of Europeans who left Europe and came her. So if there is a fault, maybe it is their fault. And what about those who are not European. Like so many others, the author puts down americans, meaning white americans. As far as I can tell, (I never investigated the matter) african americans also have high standards of cleanliness. But I know the author would not dare say that they are too clean. Perhaps the author should have a postscript where she explains that it is bad for white americans to be too clean, but not other races.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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.

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