The filthy, stinking truth

The messy history of cleanliness, and why our obsession with dirt may be making us sick.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

The thought of a daily shower would have filled the 17th century Frenchman with fear. To splash away with abandon, to open your pores and leave your body vulnerable to all that disease, would be practically asking to get sick. In fact, our bathing habits would have disgusted him, much like his habits disgust us: never washing his body with water or soap, for instance. Or changing his linen shirt to get clean.

How cleanliness has changed in the West is the engrossing (and sometimes gross) subject of Katherine Ashenburg's "The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History," which skates merrily from ancient frolics at the public baths to today's obsession with hand sanitizer and teeth-whitening strips. Ashenburg, whose previous book was a popular history of grief called "The Mourner's Dance: What We Do When People Die," argues that contemporary cleanliness has more to do with appearances than hygiene. Considering our relative lack of physical exertion compared with our ancestors, why do we consider a daily shower an ideal, anyway? Apparently, the less we sweat, the more we clean. But our very fear of dirt may actually be making us sick.

Salon spoke with Ashenburg by phone from her office in Toronto.

What did clean mean in ancient Rome?

If you were a man, you would take off all your clothes, put a little oil on your body, rub it with dust and go out into the playing field to work up a sweat. Then you would get somebody to scrape off your perspiration with an instrument that looks like a little tiny rake, called a strigil. Then you would get into a tepid bath, then into a really hot bath, then into a cold bath.

You never used any soap, and it was all done in public. If you were just a normal person, you'd probably spend a couple of hours every day in the bathhouse, where you could get wine, food, sex, a medical treatment, a haircut. You could have a depilator pluck the hair in your armpits.

Why wasn't soap popular?

Soap was a combination of animal fat and lye. The Egyptians went to great lengths to make a soap that was mild enough to use on bodies, but many cultures, including the Romans and Greeks, didn't really. So they scraped themselves. Basically, it was a kind of drastic exfoliation. They probably got as clean as soap makes you. Most people, except very rich people, didn't use soap until about the second half of the 19th century.

Why did public baths go out of fashion?

They went out of fashion because the infrastructure to run them -- the mechanisms that brought them water, that heated their water, that separated out the different heats of the various pools -- required an enormously sophisticated and complicated infrastructure, which the Roman Empire had. But when the empire started to fall apart, people couldn't maintain that, and the invading barbarians disabled the aqueducts. There was never an empire large enough to support that again.

How have attitudes about cold versus hot water for bathing changed over the centuries?

They haven't changed much. One of the most wonderful, long-lasting, historical continuities is the people who support cold-water bathing, who think it's virile and virtuous, versus the people who want to bathe in warm or hot water. They don't attach any moral significance to their choice of warm or hot water. They just think it's way more comfortable, and easier, to clean yourself in warm or hot water. There's a German expression, Warmduscher, "warm showerer," which is one of the ways you describe a man who is short on masculinity. I just love it that these two camps have been going for centuries.

We all know the saying, "Cleanliness is next to Godliness," but there was a time when quite the opposite was true. Could you talk about that?

Christianity turns out to be the only great world religion -- great in the sense of widespread and influential -- that had no teaching or interest in hygiene. In the early years of the church, the holier you were, the less you wanted to be clean. Cleanliness was kind of a luxury, like food, drink and sex, because cleanliness was comfortable and attractive. The holier you were -- and this really applied to monks and hermits and saints -- the less you would wash. And the more you smelled, the closer to God people thought you were.

So then did Buddhists and Muslims think Christians were filthy?

Absolutely. And they were right, too.

And didn't Westerners have a reputation among Asians for being filthy?

Yes. They probably were, relatively speaking, compared to affluent Chinese and to Japanese people of every class. One of the reasons may have been the influence of Christianity. Europe suffered this hiatus in cleanliness for about four or five centuries. When the great plagues came, the Black Death, in the 14th century, the king of France asked the medical faculty at the Sorbonne in Paris, "What is causing this hideous plague that is killing one out of every three Europeans, and what can we do to prevent it?" And the doctor said the people who were at risk for getting the plague had opened their pores in warm or hot water, in the baths, and they were much more susceptible.

[. . .]

But didn't at least one doctor you interviewed argue that the most important thing for preventing disease in terms of cleanliness -- hand washing -- is actually one that many Americans do inadequately?

Yes. That's a very good point. This was Dr. Germ, or Dr. Gerba, which is his real name. He has sent his researchers into public washrooms and found that only about 15 percent of people there actually wash long enough and with soap.

So much of our current interest in cleanliness is really about appearance and not ever smelling like a human being. If we smell like mangoes or vanilla and our face looks clean and our teeth are paper white, that's good enough. But really the one seriously disease-preventing practice of hand washing is not done enough.

Does our obsession with cleanliness actually make us healthier?

No. Not at all. I think it's making us sicker in the case of the hygiene hypothesis. It's increasingly believed by a large number of doctors and scientists, who say that the fact that we're not giving one of our immune systems enough dirt and germs to kind of flex its muscles on and get strong is allowing the other immune system, the one that gets allergies and asthma, to [take over].

It's kind of like a teeter-totter: The one that works on dirt and bacteria has nothing to do, and so it becomes really unexercised, and it's sort of on the ground of the teeter-totter. The other one is way in the air. Scientists couldn't understand why we had these skyrocketing rates of asthma and allergies. Now the hypothesis is that we are oversanitized to the point of making our children sick.

Is there any health benefit to bathing every day, or is it more of a social convention?

It's totally a social convention, according to the doctors I spoke with. They said it's very important to wash below our wrists [i.e., hands], and the worst thing that could happen to you, if you suddenly became a 17th century person and never washed beyond your wrists, would be some skin conditions or fungal things. It's no doubt comfortable to be clean. But there is no health benefit to washing above the wrists [i.e., the body] other than possibly preventing some fungal things.

Did you find that conventions around bathing are driven by technological change or that societal attitudes drive the technology?

The latter, very much.