Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and PurityIn this pioneering book, Virginia Smith combines archeology, psychology, biology, and sociology to reveal how and why standards of cleanliness have come to exist today. Using hundreds of first-hand accounts and sources, Smith bring us from the Neolithic age to the present, peppering her engaging prose with enlightening and often surprising details. Subconscious cleanliness has been with us since the first cell ejected a foreign invader. Even at the earliest stages of human development, our bodies produced pleasure-giving chemical opiates when things smelled or felt clean, inducing us to do things like bathing and removing dirty clothes. The need to be clean led directly to socialization, as we turned to our fellows for help with those hard to reach spots. In Eurasia during the Bronze Age, an emerging hierarchy of wealthy elites turned their love of grooming into an explosion of the cosmetic and luxury goods industry, greatly effecting the culture and economy of a vast area and leading to advances in chemistry and medicine. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
1 Biophysicality | 8 |
2 The Cosmetic Toilette | 45 |
3 Greek Hygiene | 74 |
4 Roman Baths | 102 |
5 Asceticism | 126 |
6 Medieval Morals | 144 |
7 Protestant Regimens | 185 |
8 Civil Cleanliness | 224 |
9 Health Crusaders | 264 |
10 The Body Beautiful | 307 |
Notes | 353 |
433 | |
Acknowledgements of Sources | 437 |
439 | |