Smith - Clean

clean

a history of personal hygiene and purity

virginia smith

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX 2 6 DP

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Virginia Smith 2007

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First published 2007

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ISBN 9780199297795

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This book is dedicated to

Roy Porter

(19462002)

I would here like to acknowledge and sincerely thank all those people who have listened, given advice, answered endless strange questions, responded to letters and telephone calls, lent books, read chapters and papers, put up with harangues or monologues and shown kind interest generally, with patience and curiosity, over the years. They know who they are. They certainly include all my supportive friends, and my family. In particular, I would like to thank my supervisors Brian Abel-Smith (in memoriam) and Charlotte Erikson, both at the London School of Economics, where the project began; and above all, to Roy Porter (in memoriam) at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, who gave such support and encouragement throughout my Ph.D. and well beyond, and was so close to actually seeing it all in print. Especially grateful thanks go to Peter Burke, Roger Cooter, Logie Barrow, Margaret Pelling, Peregrine Horden, Andrew Darnell, Susan James, Hannah Charlton, Jane Hutchings, Will Sulkin and Jrg Hensgen for commenting on manuscript drafts; and to Barry Lewis for the photograph. Very great thanks go to Virginia Berridge and all at the Centre for History in Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, for their support and comradeship; also to the Wellcome Trust for giving me early financial assistance to browse and work my way through their librarys extensive popular health collection, and later towards costs for completing the project. Finally, I cannot thank Luciana OFlaherty and Matthew Cotton at Oxford University Press enough, for helping to turn it all into a book. The award for sheer patience, however, goes to my dear husband, John Cumming, who has very rarely complained; and to our darling daughter Kate, who has had to suffer two obsessed parents under one roof.

. Primates grooming

. The Terme di Saturnia in Tuscany

. Nefertari at a feast

. The Minoan fresco Ladies in Blue

. Greek vase scene of a woman showering

. Head of Hygieia

. The temple baths at Gortys in Arcadia, ancient Greece

. Naiad reclining (late fourth century)

. Le Bain tapestry (early 1500s)

. Bedbugs and head lice from the medieval encyclopedia Hortatus Sanitatis

. The Womens Bathhouse (c.1496), by Albrecht Drer

. Diane de Poitiers, by Franois Clouet

. Sanctorius in his Balance (1614)

. The Ladies Cricket Club, 1785

. In the boudoir (early nineteenth century)

. The Conditional Law (c.1840)

. Woman in a Tub (c.1883), by Edgar Dgas

. Life at the Seaside, Ramsgate Sands (1854), by William Frith

. Rene (1938), by Jacques-Henri Lartigue

. Tinside Lido, Plymouth

. In the Fresh Alpine Air (1930), by C. A. Berner

. Andrews Liver Salt (c.1955)

In our hall hangs a nineteenth-century framed handbill, hand-blocked in red and blue, printed by the Inmates at the Prevention and Reformatory Institute, 237 Euston Rd, London. It used to hang in the parlour of a farmhouse near Louth in Lincolnshire, close by the chair in which, according to family legend, John Wesley sat when he came to tea one memorable afternoon. It says:

RULES
To Be Observed By This Family.
Waste Not, Want not
Gather up the fragments that remain that nothing
be lostJohn vi.12.
Do everything at its Proper Time
To everything there is a Season, and a time to
every purposeEccls.iii
Put everything in its Proper Place.
Use everything for its Proper Purpose.
Rise early. Be industrious.
Let all things be done decently and in OrderCor. xiv.40
BE PUNCTUAL. BE REGULAR. BE CLEAN .

The chair still has a place of honour; but the Rules have been relegated by the next generation to a lowly space next to the coat rack. We no longer need to be told Be Cleanbeing clean is hardly worthy of comment. Even so, there are still some visitors who look at the Rules and say simply: I agree with that. That handbill speaks with distant voices that can still be heard, but are growing fainter.

There is a certain timelessness about cleansing and cleanliness that seems to intrigue all of usand even horrify us, when ancient purification mentalities crop up in modern politicsbut there is no real mystery about cleansing and cleanliness. Historically speaking, all of it comes from somewhere, and has a reason for being. This book starts from the premiss that everything about cleanliness is datable, and traceable, and tackles its well-hidden history head-on, across all fronts. Cleansing was such a universal subject, and so obviously consisted of any number of different histories, all of them probably interrelated in various ways which we knew very little about, that it would have been unwise to leave out any scrap of evidence.

Seek and ye shall find: under every rock that was turned over were fresh sources, new angles, new events, and new people waiting to be disinterred. Hygiene was almost virgin soil, a historians dream. The work originally started in the nineteenth century, and many years later ended up in the Neolithic; I then slowly worked my way back again towards the twenty-first century. The trawl gradually started to turn into a coherent story. Inevitably, many of the details have had to be cut; and individual histories and close historical interpretation very much reduced, painfully, sometimes to a mere half-sentence. But half a loaf is better than none.