The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History [Paperback]

Katherine Ashenburg (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374531374 | ISBN-13: 978-0374531379 | Publication Date: October 28, 2008 | Edition: 1st

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 to 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 The Dirt on Clean, her charming tour of attitudes toward hygiene through time. An engrossing fusion of erudition and anecdote, The Dirt on Clean considers the bizarre prescriptions of history’s doctors, the hygienic peccadilloes of great authors, and the historic twists and turns that have brought us to a place Ashenburg considers hedonistic yet oversanitized.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

According to Ashenburg (The Mourner's Dance), the Western notion of cleanliness is a complex cultural creation that is constantly evolving, from Homer's well-washed Odysseus, who bathes before and after each of his colorful journeys, to Shaw's Eliza Doolittle, who screams in terror during her first hot bath. The ancient Romans considered cleanliness a social virtue, and Jews practiced ritual purity laws involving immersion in water. Abandoning Jewish practice, early Christians viewed bathing as a form of hedonism; they embraced saints like Godric, who, to mortify the flesh, walked from England to Jerusalem without washing or changing his clothes. Yet the Crusaders imported communal Turkish baths to medieval Europe. From the 14th to 18th centuries, kings and peasants shunned water because they thought it spread bubonic plague, and Louis XIV cleaned up by donning a fresh linen shirt. Americans, writes Ashenburg, were as filthy as their European cousins before the Civil War, but the Union's success in controlling disease through hygiene convinced its citizens that cleanliness was progressive and patriotic. Brimming with lively anecdotes, this well-researched, smartly paced and endearing history of Western cleanliness holds a welcome mirror up to our intimate selves, revealing deep-seated desires and fears spanning 2000-plus years. 82 b&w illus. (Nov. 15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School—This is a fascinating examination of the changing notions of what it means to be clean, and how those concepts fit into the worldview of different societies. The book is especially valuable for exploring the daily lives of people in past societies, but also for providing perspective on our attitudes toward ourselves, our bodies, and our world. It begins with the communal baths of the Greeks and Romans and explores the religious and ritual aspects of bathing, including Christian baptism. The public bath returned with the Crusaders, who brought the custom back to Europe in the form of the Turkish bath. With the plague and fears of communicable diseases, people avoided water-which they feared made the body vulnerable-in favor of linen cloth, which could be changed regularly, in lieu of bathing. Fear of immersing the body in water continued into the 20th century. Ashenburg, who uses interesting quotes from contemporaries to illustrate her history, speculates that in the future, when water shortages dictate new concepts of cleanliness, our own day may be seen as an age of excessive bathing and deodorizing.—Tom Holmes, King Middle School, Berkeley, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: North Point Press; 1st edition (October 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374531374
• ISBN-13: 978-0374531379
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #753,014 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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90 of 92 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Sordid History, November 13, 2007

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History (Hardcover)

Do you smell bad? If you are reading this, it's a sure thing that you are a resident of the 21st century, and it's probable that you also are a resident of a society that reinforces regular bathing and use of deodorizers, so the answer is probably no. But then, if you were living five hundred years ago, the answer would probably be no, too, although if we were somehow to time-machine someone from that time to our own, we would probably answer yes in his particular instance. Katherine Ashenburg says that cleanliness is relative, or in her words "clean is a moving target", in her surprising history of attitudes toward dirt and grooming, _The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History_ (North Point Press). In her introduction, she writes, "Even more than in the eye or the nose, cleanliness is in the mind of the beholder. Every culture defines it for itself, choosing what it sees as the perfect point between squalid and over-fastidious." She makes the point by citing cigarette smoke; only a few decades ago, airplanes and restaurants were full of it, and most people, even nonsmokers, hardly noticed, let alone complained. Now we pick up on the smell immediately and take offense. "The nose is adaptable and teachable," Ashenburg writes, and she backs up the assertion with plenty of historical evidence. Her book gives a peculiar social history, one not covered in most history books. It is wonderfully entertaining, even though much of it is uncomfortable reading, first because those other people were so much dirtier than ourselves and they didn't seem to mind it, and second because we have been sold by advertising on a hypercleanliness that is beyond anything that health or social fitness demands.

The Romans didn't use soap, though they liked soaking in public baths. The cleaning got done by oiling themselves up and using a special metal tool called a strigil to scrape off the oil and dirt. Social bathing was not something that fit into a Christian world view. "Many early saints embraced filth enthusiastically and ingeniously," says Ashenburg. The head of a convent in the fourth century warned her nuns, "A clean body and a clean dress mean an unclean soul." The Spanish Inquisition knew it was on the right track if an accused was "known to bathe," and Spanish confessors would not absolve those who washed regularly. There was an eventual turnaround for cities in which visitors could take the waters. Going to a spa was medical therapy, but eventually bathing was once again for getting clean. Advice books told people how to take baths for the best effect. It was nineteenth century America that took the lead in promoting personal hygiene. Ashenburg cites several reasons why this might be so, including having more room for bathrooms and the cleaning lessons of soldiers in the Civil War. Eventually, mild soaps from vegetable sources (like palm and olive oil to make Palmolive, get it?) insinuated themselves into homes by means of advertising, a commercial endeavor about which Americans have always been enthusiastic.

The advertisers, however, were adept at creating and exploiting fears, subtly helping people to think "Everyone would like me more if I didn't smell bad." "Halitosis" was barely a medical term before Listerine let people know that their bad breath was keeping them from happy marriages and fine paychecks. Other firms harnessed women's fears to make a market for vaginal cleaners. Tooth whitening is now big business, even though dentists say the whiteners damage teeth and gums and anyway bright white is not the way healthy teeth naturally look. Our current level of fussing over bodily cleanliness does little for our mental security or our general health. Ashenburg notes at the end of the book that we have come full circle, for modern science from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has anointed simple handwashing as "the single most important means of preventing the spread of infection." Homeric heroes and medieval knights didn't have the science, but they knew that handwashing was a good practice. However, there is little basis for our jumping in with germicidal soaps, which are another aspect of our overcleaning mania. There are serious scientific proposals that cleaning up too much may mean that our immune systems don't get enough exercise to do their job efficiently. _The Dirt on Clean_, with plenty of humor, quotations from centuries of scrubbing or lack thereof, and many illustrations, shows that humans continue to bumble their way into hygiene, whatever the fashionable definition of that might turn out to be.

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A super read....., December 16, 2007

By 

Robert Busko (North Carolina) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History (Hardcover)

Katherine Asheburg's The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History is perhaps the best read in 2007. Ashenburg's sense of irony as she delves into the meaning of clean comes across clearly to the reader. I'm not sure Ashenburg intended to be as humorous as she is or whether this sense of irony is what drives the humor, but I found myself smiling throughout the book.

One of the biggest recommendations I can make is to those who teach marketing. It doesn't matter at what level, community college, junior college, or university. If you talk about advertising, product segmentation, target marketing, this is a must read.

I also enjoyed Ashenburg's idea that cleanliness is a moving target. Clean is, in fact, relative. My parents only bathed weekly, as did I and my brother. We're products of the 50's and the Saturday evening bath whether you needed it or not. This fact grosses out my two daughters, products of the 70's and 80's. Of course, they take their twice daily showers that last at least 20 minutes. The problem was so severe that the paint constantly pealed from the woodwork due to exposure to excessive moisture. The point being in just one generation, the definition of cleanliness has shifted and shifted radically.

The Dirt on Clean is loaded with examples pulled from throughout history. Much of western civilizations attitudes toward bathing is owed to our Arab brothers as is using a fork and washing of hands before eating. This is another ironic twist to me.

The Dirt on Clean will be an interesting read on any one who loves to watch our society evolve and change.

Highly recommended.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars See-Sawing Trends on Cleanliness Throughout History, January 22, 2008

By 

G. Poirier (Orleans, ON, Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History (Hardcover)

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.