A CLEAN BREAK
Do we need to bathe daily? Author dishes the dirt on history of hygiene
The Clean Body: A Modern History
Peter Ward
Mcgill-queen’s University Press
It’s all too easy to look back and laugh.
A popular tendency is to treat history as a steady march of trial-and-error improvement toward an end at which we find ourselves, the somewhat smug beneficiaries. Take personal cleanliness. Yes, it’s hard not to snicker at, say, Louis XIV and his choice to go the last 49 years of his life without a bath. But as Peter Ward’s illuminating The Clean Body: A Modern History makes clear, we’d be wise not to feel too superior.
You might well assume a study of the transformations in European and North American hygiene since the 17th century wouldn’t be an enormously entertaining page-turner. You’d be wrong. Ward, a history professor at the University of British Columbia, stresses the complexity and multi-layered nature of his subject, noting in the online History News Network that The Clean Body is “a history of habits. It’s a history of the mundane, the everyday, a history without great events, great ideas and great actors.” None of which makes it a history any less absorbing: in the final accounting, the mundane adds up to something monumental.
Interviewed by email from his home in Vancouver, Ward showed the rigour of a true historian, as his response to an icebreaking question — are we cleaner than we’ve ever been? — bore out.
“I suppose so, at least if we can assume that an absolute standard of cleanliness exists,” he said. “But I don’t think that’s an assumption we should accept. Over the past four centuries ideas about cleanliness have evolved quite dramatically and, in earlier times, those who thought about such matters at all probably never thought of themselves as less than clean, though judged by present standards they certainly were. So, yes, we bathe and wash more often than ever, and we launder and change our clothing more frequently, too. But this doesn’t mean that, judged by their own standards, our ancestors were any less clean than we think we are.”
It’s interesting to read of how Europe and North America differed in the pace with which they were able to bridge the hygiene class divide in the 20th century.
“Overall, in the first half of the 20th century, the U.S. probably moved more quickly along the path to the new cleanliness,” said Ward. “But I think this was much more a result of American marketing sophistication and the economic advantage they gained over western Europe between 1914 and 1945 because they suffered much less from the two wars and the Depression.”
As The Clean Body makes clear, the hygiene revolution was tied in with the rise of consumerism and its concomitant exploitation of natural resources — things that have contributed greatly to our current environmental tipping point. Is Ward optimistic that we’re capable of making the necessary changes?
“You probably should ask David Suzuki these questions,” he said. “As for me, I suspect that some of our personal hygiene habits will become unsustainable, if not in our lifetimes then in those of our children. Water, in particular, is a key issue. The rich world consumes it generously. In the home it’s mostly used for cleaning things: our bodies, our clothes, our utensils. Some studies suggest that bathing now accounts for the largest proportion of household water consumption.
“Once paying the real cost of water becomes necessary, those daily 10-minute hot showers will become shorter and less frequent. People who can’t afford the price of water should be subsidized, of course, but there’s no need to subsidize the great majority of us who can afford it.
“That said, I’m not very optimistic about our ability to make such a change long enough in advance to prevent a crisis. Our record in confronting climate change isn’t at all encouraging. Perhaps, though, we can take some heart from the fact that Europeans use much less household water than we do in North America. In the book I’ve noted that we use four times as much. So there seems to be plenty of room for profligate communities to introduce efficiencies without compromising basic living standards.”
Finally, could it be that as a society we’ve taken our dedication to personal hygiene too far? Is there such a thing as too clean?
“A small but articulate minority seem to believe that we’ve become too clean, and they’ve begun to question our current hygiene practices. The questioners seem to fall into two categories. Some are skeptical scientists who doubt the health benefits of our current habits, either because they don’t seem to deliver what they promise or because they may harm us in one way or another.
Toronto dermatologist Sandy Skotnicki, for example, suggests that contemporary skin care regimens can damage the skin. She urges moderation in bathing, limited soap use and judicious use of selected skin care lotions.
“The other questioners seem to be laypersons searching for more natural and healthy lifestyles in the age of mass consumption. They have no single spokesperson or champion at the moment, but from time to time the media offer us news stories of individuals who have stopped bathing, or at least stopped using soap when they do. In effect they form part of a hygienic counterculture.”
It’s just possible, then, that the Sun King knew something we’ve lost sight of. Even so, 49 years is an awfully long time.